About
I’m Christian Smith, or, in a world of so many Smiths, R. Christian Smith, since the rchristiansmith email addresses and domain names were available but the Christian Smith ones were not. I’ve been an engineer, a teacher, a diplomat, and a builder of green roofs — earned a patent in inkjet printers, taught high schoolers about design, and managed poverty reduction programs out of American embassies in Bolivia, Uganda, Mozambique, and Pakistan. What the list adds up to is a lot of years spent on hard problems, getting people to agree what to do about them, and then doing it.
The green roofs came later: years spent shoveling dirt and installing irrigation systems for rooftop meadows on buildings in Barcelona. Now I’ve written a novel about a garden at ground level. I set it in Chicago, in a building the city made its own: a brick U open to the street, wrapped around a courtyard, built so that everyone has to cross the same garden to get to their own door. The people who built those buildings mostly couldn’t afford to live in them. They planted four trees in the courtyard anyway.
Goodwin Avenue
Goodwin Avenue is about neighbors living their lives around each other. Three brick wings, twelve apartments, one shared courtyard, and a garden tended by one of the residents. In some ways it’s not a story about anything. But then that’s the story. It’s about people. And gardening. Oh — it’s also about trees.
Out November 4, 2026.
Between now and then I’m posting the opening chapters here, free, one every two weeks. If you want to know what the book sounds like before deciding whether to buy it, that’s what this is for.
What else I’m working on
Fiction: a novel set in Dublin, about a community and the kindness, silence, complicity, memory, and land that link it. And a collection of stories about people’s phenomenological experiences of religion across human history.
Non-fiction: a book on etymology and human history — the ties that bind and the ties that free — and a treatise on the mechanics of how power persists.
And a web app, The Human Journey, tracing human migration across the Earth, with branches into language, religion, and how power shapes lives.
After Goodwin Avenue is out I’ll keep publishing here as these come along.
