Rad Smith

author of
Distant Early Warning

Rad Smith, born in 1947, grew up in Minnesota, and attended Harvard, where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop. He worked in high-tech for 15 years, then abandoned that to become a stay-at-home dad and write poetry. In 1998, he learned he was in the final stages of lung cancer, although he never smoked. Working feverishly, he finished this manuscript before he died in December of that year.