Deanna Smith is a lover of words. Over the years, she has expressed this love through art, as a poet, and through science, as a Speech-Language Pathologist. Her creative work is rooted in her experiences as a descendent of the African Diaspora, a person who thinks in two languages, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a neighbour of the many displaced peoples of Turtle Island. She has been fortunate to perform in venues across Canada and to have led workshops for participants aged 4-80. Her work has been published in Montréal Serai and in The Great Black North – Contemporary African Canadian Poetry (Frontenac 2013).