Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning artist, activist, and educator who lives in Denver, Colorado. Performing across the U.S. for over a decade, she has shared stages with Nikki Giovanni, the late Gil Scott Heron, and many more. Her poems have appeared in Union Station Magazine, Suspect Press, La Palabra, Muzzle Magazine, Malpais Review, The Pedestal, The Los Angeles Journal, Denver Syntax, Word is Bond, The Peralta Press, Yellow Chair Review, and in the anthologies The Mutiny Info Reader, Diverse-City, His Rib: Anthology of Women, and In Our Own Words. Her chapbook collection of poems, Thirteen Descansos, was published by Penmanship Books, and her forthcoming collection, A Gospel of Bones, will be available from Alternating Current Press in Spring 2020.

She was the founding Slammaster of Slam Nuba, and spent 12 years in the poetry slam arena as a competing poet, coach, organizer, board member, eventually serving as the Executive Director of Poetry Slam, Inc. from 2014-2018. She placed as a finalist multiple times in the Women of the World Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and she has earned the champion title at Southwest Shootout and the Taos Poetry Festival: Versing in Converse three times. In addition, she has worked extensively with youth, serving as a Partner Artist with Youth On Record, and as co-coach of Denver Minor Disturbance Youth Poetry Slam, resulting in two international championships. Currently, Suzi Q. is at work on her next collection while she works in Denver with Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and she serves as the co-Chair of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs.