Dinitia Smith

Biography

Dinitia Smith was born in Cumberland, Maryland and raised primarily in Great Britain, where her father was a journalist. She came to the United States in 1959 and lived in New York City and Westchester. After graduating from Smith College, she worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in New York. She enrolled in the New York University Film School and in 1971 obtained a Masters of Fine Arts. That year, she wrote and directed her first film, Passing Quietly Through, under her then-married name McCarthy. That film was one of the first films by a woman to be chosen for the New York Film Festival. Smith continued to make documentaries, including some with American documentary filmmaker, David Grubin, and also wrote several screenplays. Her films have been shown at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1975, Smith won an Emmy Award for a film she made for WNBC – TV. She published her first novel, The Hard Rain, in 1980. Her second novel, Remember This, won her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary journals.

Smith was also a contributing editor at New York magazine; from 1995 to 2006 she worked for The New York Times, where she wrote about arts and intellectual trends and ideas. Her third novel, The Illusionist, was published in 1997 and her upcoming novel, The Honeymoon is set to be published in early 2016 by Other Press.

Smith has taught at Columbia University and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

Personal life

Smith is married to David Nasaw, an author and historian, and the Arthur M. Schlesinger Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has twin sons: Peter Caleb Nasaw (b. 1980), a social worker, and journalist Daniel Allen Nasaw (b. 1980).