Jessica Smith is a teacher, librarian, and writer.  She is currently a full-time Instructor of English at the University of Alabama and an Adjunct Instructor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Smith's creative work includes three full-length poetry books, Organic Furniture Cellar, Life-List, and How to Know the Flowers, and eighteen chapbooks including Lion's Den, The Lover is Absent, and Shifting Landscapes from above/ground press, Fever (Model Press), and The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test (Essay Press). Her fourth major poetry project, The Daybooks, is forthcoming as a series of four full-length books, to be released annually from 2024-2027. 

As a librarian, Smith has archived for NYPL/Internet Archive and the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo. She blends her interests in poetry and archives in her current Ph.D. research on the history of pocket notebooks in 19th-21st century American culture.