George Drury Smith

I currently divide my time between Los Angeles and Amsterdam, where my now-husband had several post-doctoral research teaching fellowships at Dutch universities after completing his PhD in theoretical linguistics at UCLA. He now has a language services business.

I occupy myself with writing, editing and reading. My novel, "The Slant hug ’o time," was published by Kitsune Books in 2012 (available on Amazon).

I worked with Sophie Rachmuhl editing a translation of her French doctoral dissertation on the Los Angeles poetry scene which was published as "A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, Los Angeles, 1950-1990" by Otis College of Art and Design's Seismicity Editions in late 2014. I am listed as co-translator.

My interest in experimental, “avant-garde” writing spurred me to start the magazine Beyond Baroque in 1968 and I opened Beyond Baroque Center in Venice, California, which focused on literature, publishing, poetry and fiction readings and workshops, art exhibitions and musical presentations. In 1972 this became Beyond Baroque Foundation, a nonprofit tax-exempt educational organization. Around 1980 Beyond Baroque moved into The Old Venice City Hall, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice and I resigned as president and director of the foundation, but stayed on its board of trustees for another decade. What became known as Beyond Baroque Cultural Arts Center has survived, and is still in the Old Venice City Hall in Venice, said to be one of a handful of such institutions in the country.

I am currently working on what I call “memoires” relating to Beyond Baroque.

I am interested in languages, which I studied in Europe for three years as an undergraduate. I am still reasonably fluent in French, but much less so in Spanish and German, which I once spoke fluently. I studied in France, Spain, Austria and Germany for three years as an undergraduate and I received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with majors in French and Spanish and a minor in German in1953 from Marietta College, and went on to the University of Minnesota as a graduate teaching assistant, but did not complete work for an M.A. Later I entered the Graduate Internship Program in Teacher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, and then did some graduate work in French, German and Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles.

My careers have involved being a trainer and reservations manager for Pan American World Airways in Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas; teaching foreign languages and ESL in San Jose and Santa Monica, California; working for The Argonaut, a weekly newspaper in the Los Angeles coastal area in various capacities, including copy editor, associate publisher and CFO.

I enjoy reading, movies (especially foreign and “far-out”), theater, classical music and art, and spend a few weeks in Paris several times a year while in Europe.