Annick Smith

Annick Smith is a writer and filmmaker from western Montana. Born in Paris, she grew up in Chicago, lived in Seattle, and has settled in Montana for over fifty years. She was a filmmaker first, producing the prize-winning feature "Heartland" and was a co-producer of "A River Runs Through It." Her documentaries include a series about Indian tribes in the Inland Northwest, "The Real People," for public television, and a portrait of poet Richard Hugo, "Kicking the Loose Gravel Home." Smith was a founding member of the Sundance Film Institute and the Independent Features Project. 
Her nature essays and travel articles have appeared in such publications as Orion, Outside, Audubon, National Geo Traveler, Travel & Leisure, the New York Times, and regional magazines, as well as in literary journals such as TriQuarterly. Her fiction has been published in Story magazine and her story "It's Come to This," appeared in Best American Short Stories 1992, won a National Magazine Award for short fiction, and has been widely anthologized. Smith's most recent book is a memoir, road trip, dog book, Crossing the Plains with Bruno (Trinity U. Press, 2015). Other books include an earlier memoir, Homestead (Milkweed), a collection of essays In This We are Native (Lyons/Globe Pequot), a book about Oklahoma's tall grass prairies, Big Bluestem (The Nature Conservancy/Council Oak Books) and the anthologies, The Last Best Place, co-edited with William Kittredge (MT Historical Soc./U of Washington Press) and The Wide Open: Prose, Poems, and Photographs of the Prairie co-edited with Susan O'Connor (University of Nebraska Press).
She has also been a teacher, an editor, a community organizer, and an environmental activist as well as founder of Hellgate Writers, a literary center in Missoula and the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop on Flathead Lake. Smith is currently working with Susan O'Connor on a book about the traditional and personal meanings of Hearth, as well as an illustrated book about her photographer father and artist uncles, The Deutsch Brothers in Chicago. She lives on a homestead ranch in Montana's Blackfoot Valley, often with companion William Kittredge andher sons and their families.