After growing fatter in Houston, Texas, where he allegedly received a degree in Latin American Studies and English at Rice University, Tyler Stoddard Smith decided to put his degrees to work by going to the nexus of English Lit and Latin American Studies—Prague. He ran around in Prague for a while with his friend and drank absinthe, ultimately finding himself suspended from the Charles Bridge in a full wedgie for reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Portuguese to the Czech luge team.
From there he moved on to Florence, where he began a period of being escorted away from cultural landmarks by the eponymous Calvino “the Unreasonable” who seems to frown on the spilling of gelati all over ancient artifacts. Before high-tailing back stateside for some creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Mr. Smith was exiled from Italy because of a mime. Rather, he engaged in a "mime fight" outside the Uffizi and wound up stuck in an imaginary box for two days until his friend could muster up the lira to get him a furlough.
Aside from whipping Allen Ginsberg’s ASS at “Frogger,” Mr. Smith has a vast array of celebrity “friends.” He once tried to buy Uma Thurman a pack of cigarettes on 23rd street in New York, was stood up for a drink by Eric Stoltz and Noah Baumbach at the Omni hotel in Houston, elbowed by Pete Rose at the airport in San Francisco and had beer poured on his head by John Goodman in New Orleans.
His literary influences range from Fitzgerald to family and friends and he is not afraid to break up with you if you can’t abide the band AC/DC. Tyler Smith would like to provide a web address or what he likes to call a “link” to a website, but he took a wrong turn somewhere in Ludditeville and is currently stuck on the information super dirt road. His works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in: Boxcar Poetry Review, The Bullfight Review, Modern Drunkard, Monkeybicycle and Yankee Pot Roast among others.
He is currently at work on a novel that features 4th grade, Macbeth and a kid with a bad lisp. For more (or less) information on Tyler Smith, feel free to e-mail him at: stoddard.smith@gmail.com
And for those about to rock, he salutes you.