Zinnia Smith is a writer and educator based in Somerville…

She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Stony Brook University. Her work is published with TSR: The Southampton Review, East, Voicemail Poems, andPeach Mag, among others. Her essay, "American Girl," won Fugue's 2018 writing contest in prose, and her fiction was nominated for Sundress’s Best of the Net 2019. She was a semi-finalist for American Short Fiction’s 2019 American Short(er) Fiction writing contest. In June 2022, her poem was long listed for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize by Foundlings Press. Her fiction is featured in the speculative anthology WORLDS IN WHICH. She received a 2024 Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals for the literary arts, and received a 2025 Literature Artist Fellowship grant from the Somerville Arts Council.

She creates and organizes community engagement experiences via decolonized learning spaces. She partners with local businesses to offer multidisciplinary writing classes, approachable for all writing levels, that that emphasizes inspiration to fuel spiritual and emotional wellbeing. She recently organized the arts pop-up, Table Conversation, in Davis Square, Somerville. Table Conversation offered regularly scheduled workshops led by artists, writers, and educators hungry to share what inspires them the most. All artists were paid for their work. The goal was to bring living poetry to the classroom— something grounded in the lived experience and social reality, something that will live on and sustain us after we leave the classroom space.

Zinnia has taught writing, literature, and American culture classes at Stony Brook University, Bunker Hill Community College, arts nonprofits, and independently at local community spaces. She joined the Fall 2023 cohort for Critical Embodied Wellness for Educators (College of Education at California State Dominguez Hills). She’s passionate about the collaborative efforts of multicultural classroom spaces and arts communities, and through mentors, her disability became a wisdom and guide in these practices. She loves to discuss how to cultivate pedagogy and arts programming that can bring the world towards a more supportive and beautiful place.

In her free time, she’s learning about good wine, walking aimlessly, and working on her haunted house novel….