BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : BRITISH BLACK FEMALE : PROFESSOR OF CREATIVE WRITING : CLEVER, CREATIVE AND VERY BRIGHT : GOES INTO THE "HALL OF BLACK GENIUS"

                 BLACK    SOCIAL    HISTORY

Zadie Smith
PROFESSOR   OF   CREATIVE    WRITING :

Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is a British novelist, essayist and short story writer.
As of 2012, she has published four novels, all of which have received substantial critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors, and was also included in the 2013 list. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on September 1, 2010. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006 and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list.
Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.
Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie". Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.

Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature. In an interview with The Guardian in 2000, Smith corrected a newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones," she said.
Zadie Smith seems to have been rejected for a place in the Cambridge Footlights by the popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb, while all three were studying at Cambridge University in the 1990s.
At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called The Mays Anthology. (See Short stories.) These attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A.P. Watt. Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001.

White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels). The novel was adapted for television in 2002 by Channel 4. She also served as "writer in residence" at the ICA in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, Piece of Flesh, as the culmination of this role.
In interviews she reported that the hype surrounding her first novel had caused her to suffer a short spell of writer's block. Nevertheless, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as positive as it had been to White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002–2003 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. She started work on a still unreleased book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, aka Fail Better, in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably are included in the essay collection Changing My Mind, published in November 2009.
The second novel was followed by another, On Beauty (published in September 2005), which is set largely in and around Greater Boston and which attracted more acclaim. This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, she joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction as of 1 September 2010.
Beginning with the March 2010 issue, extending until late 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for Harper's Magazine.

Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. Smith dedicated On Beauty to "my dear Laird". The couple lived in Monti, Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007 and are now based between New York City and Queen's Park, London. They have a daughter (Kit; born 2009), and are currently expecting their second child in the spring of 2013.

BLACK   SOCIAL   HISTORY

Novels

• White Teeth (2000)
• The Autograph Man (2002)
• On Beauty (2005)
• Changing my mind : occasional essays (2009)
• NW (2012)

As editor

• Piece of Flesh (2001), an anthology of erotic short stories featuring Daren King, Toby Litt and Matt Thorne.
• The Book of Other People (2007)