Imagine your life as a page-turner novel, filled with clandestine operations and transformative work across the globe. That’s the reality for Timothy J. Smith, our guest, who has led a life as intriguing as the fiction he pens. Smuggling plays from Czechoslovakia, spending nights in African jails, narrowly escaping a perilous journey to Puerto Rico, Smith’s real-life adventures make for an engaging and unpredictable conversation and his thrilling tales don’t stop at his own experiences; they serve as the foundation for his novels. We trace Timothy’s journey from idealistic youngster to dedicated aid worker, an odyssey that has seen him influence both policy and people, shaping the Palestinian economy and founding the Tanzania Tree Project.
Timothy Jay Smith’s Website
www.timothyjaysmith.com
About Timothy Jay Smith
Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island, published Arcade CrimeWise in 2020, previously won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland, published in 2019 by Arcade Publishing, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.
Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. His stage play, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award, and his screenplays have won competitions sponsored by the American Screenwriters Association, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Fresh Voices, StoryPros, and the Hollywood Screenwriting Institute. He is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.
