Jack Smith has an MA in creative writing and PhD in English. He has published six novels and four works of nonfiction. His most recent novels are If Winter Comes (2020), RUN (2020), Miss Manners for War Criminals (2017), Being (2016), Icon (2014), and Hog to Hog, which won the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2008. He has published stories in numerous literary magazines, including Southern Review, North American Review, Texas Review, Xconnect, In Posse Review, and Night Train. His reviews have appeared widely in such publications as California Review of Books, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, American Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Pleiades: Literature in Context, the Missouri Review, Xconnect, and Environment magazine. He has published several dozen articles in both Novel & Short Story Writer's Market and The Writer magazine. His creative writing book, Write and Revise for Publication: A 6-Month Plan for Crafting an Exceptional Novel and Other Works of Fiction, was published in 2013 by Writer's Digest Books. A collection of his articles is available in Inventing the World: The Fiction Writer's Guidebook to Craft and Process.

His latest nonfiction book is Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books. His coauthored nonfiction environmental book entitled Killing Me Softly was published by Monthly Review Press in 2002. Besides his writing, Smith was fiction editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online literary magazine published by Truman State University, for 25 years.