Carol Smith

Carol Smith is an award-winning journalist and editor for NPR affiliate KUOW in Seattle. Previously, she worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times. She has been a PEN Literary Finalist for her journalism, been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize seven times, and twice for the Pushcart. Her essays and other writings have appeared in more than a dozen literary journals. She was recently named Editor of the Year by the Public Media Journalists Association. Her memoir, CROSSING THE RIVER: SEVEN STORIES THAT SAVED MY LIFE came out in 2021 from Abrams Press in New York. It’s the story of how she dealt with the unexpected death of her seven-year-old son, Christopher, and the seven people who unwittingly helped her on that journey. These are stories of survival and transformation, of people confronting devastating situations that changed them in unexpected ways. A mixture of memoir and reporting, this book is about posttraumatic resilience in the face of grief and how other people’s stories can help us through the most devastating experiences.

Articles:

Hope Can Be Learned

This is an excerpt from Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life, a Memoir (Abrams Press, 2021), by Carol Smith.  This is a book about trauma and grief. But it’s also a book about love, about living, about persistence and joy. It’s about reinventing, finding purpose, and discovering strength you didn’t know you had until you were called upon to use it. Every one of us fears there is something we could not survive. For me, it was the death of my only child when he was seven years old. He died suddenly, during what was shaping up […]

Read More

How Child-Loss Feels: A ‘Fugue of Grief’

This is an excerpt from Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life, a Memoir (Abrams Press, 2021), by Carol Smith I did not go to my son Christopher’s school the day the nurse came to speak. Instead, I lay fetal-like on his bed, my face pressed to his sheets. The trace scents of crayons and Band-Aids, mud and baseball leather, kept me breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut. Images clicked by like a reel in his View-Master: Christopher, riding a therapy horse, showing off his “tricks,” his arms sticking straight out, his head thrown back, laughing. Christopher, hiding […]

Read More