Colby Cedar Smith

Colby Cedar Smith built Call Me Athena: Girl from Detroit loosely on her own paternal grandmother. Andrews McMeel published it in 2021, a novel in verse told by three narrators and centred on Mary, the American born daughter of Greek and French immigrants growing up in 1930s Detroit and struggling for independence and an identity of her own. The Library of Michigan named it a 2022 Michigan Notable Book, and the Cybils awards listed it as a poetry finalist. Smith took degrees at Colorado College and Harvard, has taught creative writing at the Arts Council of Princeton, and received a New Jersey artist fellowship in poetry in 2020. Her second verse novel, The Siren and the Star, came from Simon and Schuster in October 2025 and sets a singer of seventeen at the New England Conservatory beside the baroque composer Barbara Strozzi.