Born on January 13th, 1893, in Long  Valley, California, Clark Ashton Smith began to write at the age of eleven and was wholly self-educated.

At seventeen, he sold stories to The Black Cat, The Overland Monthly, and other magazines. His first collection of verse was published only two years later, and was hailed as the work of a prodigy and classed with Chatterton, Rossetti and Bryant.

By the age of thirty-five Smith focused on writing short stories and it was then, with publication in Weird Tales of "The End of the Story," that he discovered his unique prose voice. The success of that story inspired others tales: all weird, macabre, fantastic or pseudo-scientific.

He has contributed poetry and fiction to over fifty magazines, including The Yale Review, The London Mercury, Munsey's, Asia, Wings, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Philippine Magazine and the Mencken Smart Set and has been included in more than a dozen anthologies.

His early book-length publications were all printed in limited editions, with the result that they are all collectors' items today. Four of his five volumes are entirely poetry: The Star-Treader, Odes and Sonnets, Ebony and Crystal, and SandalWood. The fifth is a pamphlet of tales: The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. Later, in 1941, Out of Space and Time, a volume of stories selected by Smith himself, was released. It represented the best of his writings to that point.

Smith was also a painter and sculptor. His sculptures, which are especially powerful and fascinating, are cut largely from strange and unusual minerals and have been compared to pre-Columbian art.

Smith has had many careers: journalist, fruit picker and packer, wood chopper, typist, cement-mixer, gardener, hard-rock miner, and mucker and windlasser.

Smith's lineage is the descendant of Norman-French counts and barons, of Lancashire baronets and Crusaders. One of his Ashton forebears was beheaded for his part in the famed Gunpowder Plot. His mother's family, the Gaylords, came to New England in 1630—Huguenot Gaillards who fled persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Smith's father, Timeus Smith, was a world-traveler in his early years, but settled at last in Auburn, where he lived until his death in the 1930's.

Readers of weird lore in our time are familiar with the famed Cthulhu mythology of H. P. Lovecraft, the mythology to which other writers added bits and portions; of those writers, none added so much as Clark Ashton Smith.  Yet Smith found time to invent his own fantasy worlds: the fabled land of Averoigne, Zothique, Vulthoom, Hyperborea, and other lost worlds. His hyperborean settings have achieved a popularity equaled only by the lore of legend-haunted Arkham that was Lovecraft's.

For a time it was said by many that he was the greatest living American writer of macabre and fantastic tales, and certainly the greatest living stylist in the genre.

Much of his work is being reissued by Hippocampus Press.   Two examples are The Black Diamonds (a novel written at the age of 14) and The Last Oblivion (best of Smith's fantastic poetry).

Clark Ashton Smith died in California in August, 1961, at the age of 68.  His ashes were buried near where he lived, in Auburn, California, on a high hill.

January 2003, a historical marker was laid near the county courthouse that honors Smith.  A large boulder from his original home site was also relocated to the same spot.

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The Clark Ashton Smith Poetry Prize is awarded to the adult winner of the Sierra Foothill Poetry Contest.  The contest is open to poets within an eight county area in north eastern California, an area surrounding Clark Ashton Smith's hometown of Auburn.

2003 winner
Spring Calf, E Jaques Boone, Avery, Ca

2004 winner
Sad-Eyed Dog, Anthony R. Castle, Grass Valley, Ca