Roger Kimmel Smith

A well-composed sentence contains the power to detonate. For a dozen years or more I’ve been making a living smithing words and sentences about a gamut of things, such as:

– government, politics, diplomacy, world news;

– media, communications, advertising, propaganda;

– world history, black history, cultural, media, and show-business history;

– literature, cinema, music, business;

– social sciences, education, nuclear weapons, peace studies…

[To be ruthlessly candid, I do balance my word-and-sentence mongering nowadays with some time slinging fruits and vegetables. The latter are always to the point. Never verbose.]

My most recent freelance assignment was for National Geographic. For about a decade I was a contributing editor and news curator for Global Issues in Context, an award-winning online current-events resource published by Cengage Gale (Library Journal, “Best Databases,” 2014).

I spent five youthful years working at the United Nations as a peace and disarmament networker. I’ve also taught—a wide variety of subjects in settings varying from college campuses to a juvenile prison to a cooperative family learning center.

You can hear me on WRFI Community Radio Friday afternoons noon to 2pm, hosting my 1920s/30s music and popular culture show “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune.”

From 2020-2023 I was a contributing host and producer for a video and audio podcast series on YouTube called When Humanists Attack!!

Grew up in Brooklyn, now live in Brooktondale, upstate New York. My Master’s is in media ecology–a term associated with my thesis advisor, the late great Neil Postman. The upshot is, I am perennially and habitually tracking the epistemological ramifications of contemporary media environments. Indeed, epistemic crisis is very much alive and afoot.

I’m the son of a writer. Robert Kimmel Smith passed away on April 18, 2020, at age 89. The Hollywood adaptation of his kids’ book, The War With Grandpa, starring Robert de Niro and a fabulous cast, was released that October. For the record, I loved my grandpa very much and never went to war with him.

But, you know, enough about me, let’s talk about you. What can this wordsmith do for you?