Bill Smoot

Bill Smoot grew up in Maysville, Kentucky. He attended college at Purdue University, where he became editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Purdue Exponent. When the administration deemed the paper too liberal, President Fred Hovde fired Smoot as editor of the paper. The campus rose up in protest, and the administration reinstated Smoot. The incident led to the paper becoming independent of university control.

Bill Smoot received his PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1973 and taught in several colleges and high schools in the coming years. In 2010, he published Conversations With Great Teachers (Indiana University Press), a book of interviews with great teachers in various fields across the country. The fifty-one teachers included Academy Award actor Martin Landau, baseball manager Ron Washington, ballerina Suki Shorer, physicist Eric Mazur, and writer William Gass.

Bill Smoot is also an essayist and a fiction writer, and his short stories have appeared in many publications, among them Ninth Letter, Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review.

Since 2013, Bill Smoot has taught at Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin Prison.

His website is billsmoot.net