About
Journalist. Editor.
Author. Teacher.
Martin J. Smith has spent nearly five decades telling true stories and inventing better ones — from night cops at The Pittsburgh Press to the editor’s chair at two of the West’s great magazines, with eleven books along the way.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Smith began writing professionally as a Penn State undergraduate in the late 1970s. His fifteen years as a newspaper reporter — at The Express in Easton, Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Press, and The Orange County Register — took him from the poverty of southwestern Pennsylvania to Nevada’s Mustang Ranch, the Los Angeles riots, revolution in Manila, pre-glasnost Siberia, and the early days of cyberspace. His journalism has earned more than fifty newspaper and magazine writing awards.
As an editor, he served as a senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine and, from 2007 to 2016, as editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine, which during his tenure was named the best city and metropolitan magazine in the western United States five times. He has edited work by Anne Lamott, Joseph Wambaugh, Walter Mosley, Amy Tan, Martin Dugard, Janet Fitch, Edward Humes, and James Ellroy.
His five previous crime novels — the four-book Memory Series and the standalone Combustion — have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Barry awards, and praised by Michael Connelly, James Ellroy, and Laura Lippman. His five nonfiction books range from American pop history (Poplorica, Oops, with the late Patrick J. Kiger) to The Wild Duck Chase — basis of the award-winning documentary The Million Dollar Duck — and Going to Trinidad, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.
Smith taught novel-writing for six years at Chapman University, is a longtime staff member of California’s Community of Writers, and co-founded the Grand County Community of Writers. He lives in rural Grand County, Colorado, with his wife, Judith — they married in 1982 — where he served two years as board president of Habitat for Humanity of Grand County and still volunteers on its construction committee. They have two adult children, Lanie and Parker, and two dogs, Callie and Finn.
His sixth novel, 27 Knots, will be published by Open Road Media on November 24, 2026. Since late 2025 he has written The Shitshow Observed, a Substack of essays on aging.
The Shitshow Observed
Essays on aging — mortality, grief, old dogs, regrettable choices, late-life eccentricities, and the absurdist dilemma of tooth whitening at age seventy. Free.
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