Irene Hoge Smith is a writer and psychotherapist. Her professional writing has addressed trauma, bereavement, torture and crises of meaning, and her personal essays have to do with love, loss, identity, and family complications.

She is a graduate of the New Directions postgraduate writing program of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute and her essays have appeared in journals including Amsterdam Quarterly,  Prick of the Spindle, Vineleaves Literary Journal, District Lines, Stonecoast Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Wisconsin Review.   She was a Spring 2016 AWP Writer-to-Writer mentee, working with Claude Clayton Smith.

Irene Hoge Smith’s book The Good Poetic Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, (IPBooks, 2021) is about her mother, the late Southern California poet francEyE, who left the family when Smith was young, lived for several years with fellow poet Charles Bukowski (and had his daughter), and became a prolific and respected poet in her own right.

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