Biographical Information

Gordon Smith
Born in 1951, Upper Darby, PA. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
Raised for the most part in Eden, NY, a farm town 40 mi. south of Buffalo. Great corn festival every summer! Lots of forests around where I lived to walk in and gather inspiration for The Forest in the Hallway. (I never saw any witches, though.)

Graduated Eden Central High School, 1969.
BS in Fine Arts, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1973. I studied organic chemistry, but majored in fine art (painting). I was an upstanding member of the Antioch College Fire Department, and chief for one year.

I moved to San Francisco in 1973, where I worked at Tower Records and taught myself graphic design. (I did all their print advertising for several years.) Then on to being a free-lance designer, art director for a legal magazine, and staff designer for an education-related Web site. Fortunately, I've had enough free time to write — frankly I'm a bit bored with design: it doesn't hold a candle to inventing worlds and populating them with interesting characters.

The Forest in the Hallway, my first book, began as a story told to my daughter, now in college, during our daily commute to her middle school. I've finished the first draft of my next book, Beatriz and the Crazed Librarians from the Future.