Paul Smyth was born in Boston in 1944, and grew up in Holliston, Massachusetts.  At sixteen, he quit school and spent several years hitchhiking and motorcycling through North America, living for periods in the San Francisco Bay Area, rural Mexico, and Provincetown, Cape Cod, where he got his first writing job freelancing for the New Beacon newspaper.

At twenty, he enrolled in Harvard University’s extension program, where he was mentored by poet/critic Theodore Morrison and received his B.A. in 1968.  While completing his studies, he gave poetry readings and held workshops around New England, including the Breadloaf Conference.

Following graduation, Smyth taught writing and literature at Mount Holyoke College and later at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.  During this time he wrote prolifically and gave numerous readings in the U.S. and in Ireland, Austria and Greece.

After a decade of teaching, Smyth “slipped the velvet bonds of academe“, and went to live on the Greek island of Aegina and in Crete, where he wrote poetry, two novels, and a long prose-poem memoir.

Returning to New England, he continued to write poetry and prose, also devoting time to gardening, carpentry, and stonework.  He later moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he died in December of 2006, just after completing the final edits for his book, A Plausible Light, New and Collected Poems (El Leon Literary Arts, 2008).