Bridget Smith

Bridget Smith was born Gordon Smith. She was raised in a rural Republican farm town in upstate New York and, viewed from the great remove of age, sees it as having been an idyllic upbringing, very close to the natural world of butterflies, trees, pond-life, snakes, and dogs. Her father gave her and her sister the great gift of reading aloud to them almost every night, stories by C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and Conan Doyle, among others. Around age fifty, she acknowledged that the life she had led as a man up until that point was an increasingly unendurable sham and in 2006 she came over from the Dark Side (no offense, gents). Her transition from male to female was remarkably smooth, to her great relief, with friends and family almost universally supporting her. The transition from painting to writing has also been a pleasant surprise.

Escaping the politics and confines of the small town of Eden, she graduated from Antioch College with a BS in Painting and Organic Chemistry and fought fires with the volunteer fire department on campus and in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Moving to San Francisco after graduation brought about a reorientation of her life, which led to marriage, parenthood, and a career in graphic design.

Great works of literature continued to be an uplifting experience, with works by Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, and Tolstoy at the top of the list, and her painting gave way to writing. Her young adult fantasy novel "The Forest in the Hallway" was published in 2006 by Clarion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

She lives happily in San Francisco with a satisfying circle of friends and relatives (who are kind enough to laugh at her jokes), her partner Rae, their cats Pyewacket, Xenia, and Luna.