L. Smith, is a 2021 graduate of Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Teaching Writing program and holds an undergraduate degree in mass communications, advertising focus, and a writing minor, from Texas State University. Reconnecting with her childhood passion for creative writing as an undergraduate, she used creative writing as an outlet while experiencing the hills and valleys of young adult life. She writes poems, prose, fiction, and non-fiction that reflect life's hills and valleys and that give voice to social injustice. She has traveled internationally and across the US as an Air Force brat, and later, domestically, as a technical trainer. She has freelanced for central Texas newspapers and taught English, reading, and history in various central Texas schools, including University of Texas Charter schools. Currently living in Austin, Texas, brought there as a teen with her family per her late loving father's USAF military duty, she is a New Orleans conceived and cultured, divorced mother of one beautiful, resilient daughter, a daughter of a ride-or-die mama, a dog mom of a geriatric, anti-social Chihuahua, and a life-long student of writing acumen, with incredible gratitude for teaching writing professors.