How playwright and College of Liberal Arts instructor Cleavon Smith’s literary passion became his life’s adventure
Cleavon Smith
By Selene Lawrence, CLA Student Writer - May 7, 2025
Cleavon Smith has always been a writer, even before he knew it. His reverence for the written word was something he carried with him since childhood, and something that guided him to Japan, San Francisco, and more recently, to Corvallis. Smith grew up in a small town in Mississippi. It was the same town his mother grew up in, on land that Smith’s grandmother owned, a remarkable feat for a Black woman without a formal education in 1940s Mississippi. The support of his family, especially his mother, had a significant impact on Smith’s early life. “She was raised by a really strong mom, and she did the same for me,” Smith recalled. “So much of my background is influenced by their hopes and dreams.”
When he was 17, Smith received a Congressional nomination to attend the United States Naval Academy, where he played football. He hadn’t initially planned on a military career, but Smith was eager to continue his education in a place that offered connections and professional support. “I was going to do my five years and go back to Mississippi because I did not see myself living outside of that state,” he explained. “Once I got out of the academy, I had a succession of great mentors; one mentor really encouraged me to recognize my own potential and to see what was possible for me in the Navy. That experience was what made me think about a career as a naval officer, and has influenced the way I approach teaching. I had these mentors who didn't know it at the time, but they were absolutely inspiring. It inspired me to be intentional in each and every interaction with my students.”
As he embarked on his naval career, literature remained the heart of Smith’s world. “I don't think I've read as much since I've gotten out of the Navy,” Smith said. “My desire to write flourished there, strangely enough. Even when I was in grad school, I don't think I read as much as I did when I was at sea.” As his career progressed, Smith became immersed in international literature. Whenever he went abroad, he made it a habit to read books from the countries he would be stationed in. “I just read as much as I possibly could. Part of it was that I didn't think that everyone should have to orient themselves to me as an American. Through the books, I got an understanding of where I was going; it just made me that much more attentive to language, and it made me attentive to how much could be communicated off the page.”
In the early 1990s, Smith attended the Navy Supply Corps School in Athens, Georgia. During that time, the University of Georgia held a gathering of Nobel laureates of literature in preparation for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Many celebrated authors attended, including Wole Soyinka, Czesław Miłosz, Toni Morrison, and 1994 Nobel recipient Kenzaburō Ōe. Smith attended the event with a friend from his days in the Naval Academy, and made it his goal to familiarize himself with the work of every visiting laureate. After reading a translation of Ōe’s acceptance speech, Smith soon became captivated by Japanese literature. He found resonance with Ōe’s work, as well as that of Kōbō Abe, Yukio Mishima, and Yasunari Kawabata. “Once I started doing that, I put in my request to be stationed in Japan,” Smith explained. “Then once I was there, it went from a novelty to an obsession. Just being there, being immersed in the culture, I realized how much I had been missing. It really influenced my writing voice.” Smith spent two years living in Japan, a time that would be a major turning point in his life and career.
After his time in Japan ended, Smith moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he would remain for the next chapter of his life. One day in his late 20s, Smith found himself in the hospital at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, awaiting the CT scan that would hopefully explain his persistent headaches. Ultimately, it was nothing serious, but as he waited, he began to imagine what his life would look like if he had to consider the worst outcome. “I just projected forward,” he said. “I'll go back to the DC area, you know, and see a lot of my friends there. Then I'll go home to Mississippi and be with my family. But then it was like, no, I don't have that time to waste. I haven't written the novel that I want to write. It was there that I realized that doing anything other than writing felt like a distraction to my purpose.”
Smith had been on the path with serious intent to become an admiral in the U.S. Navy but resigned his commission, knowing deep down that his purpose was to write. He started taking classes through a local college and for the first time, he found himself in a community of writers. “I just wanted to write,” said Smith, “the instructor for the class, Floyd Salas, was probably, even to this date, the most passionate teacher I’ve ever had.” Salas encouraged Smith to seek out an M.F.A. program to continue his education. Following his mentor’s advice, Smith was soon accepted into Mills College (now a part of Northeastern University’s global university system) in Oakland to study under renowned poet Chana Bloch, who had been a translator of Yehuda Amichai, one of Smith’s favorite poets.
Smith pursued fiction writing throughout his graduate program and went on to teach creative writing after graduating. While teaching at Berkeley City College, Smith invited a playwright in his department to give a lecture to his class on the dramatic arts so his students could learn from someone with experience in the field. After the lecture, his coworker challenged him to write 10 pages of dialogue to simulate writing a short play. Smith took up the challenge, and something clicked. He soon joined the creative community at PlayGround, a theatre company dedicated to uplifting emerging playwrights, where he would submit a short play every month in hopes of being selected for a staged reading.
“I got in that program and it was like being in grad school again,” Smith recalled. “They were giving me practice. I didn't have a theater background; I never saw professional theater until I went to college. What really informed that growth was watching other people and just seeing what was possible: how other people approached the different topics and the varied ways that people told their stories. I've had to learn a lot. I've seen a lot of stuff out there. In a lot of ways, I am grateful for it, because I feel that my writing is still young. Not young in spirit, but I feel like I still have several years to go before I come close to reaching my potential. It’s fun, there's something exciting about that.” Since then, Smith has become an established figure in California’s theater community, particularly in the Bay Area, where many of his plays have been produced.
“What I like about theater is that it’s less of a medium for my writing, but more like a medium for my dilemmas. I try to present plays in which there's no easy answer, and we're just modeling, just sitting through the question. A lot of my personal dilemmas, and the limits around identity specifically, get presented on the stage. But more than that,” Smith said, “theater making is so incredibly collaborative, there’s just immediate appreciation and gratitude for other people's craft and art. It's going to be different each time with who you're working with; all the minds come together and create this very unique experience that can't really be replicated. That sustains me.”
After two decades of teaching in the Bay Area, Smith was ready for a change. He moved to Corvallis with his family three years ago, initially planning to focus on his writing. “I was burned out. The last thing I wanted to do was teach again, and part of it was because it was the first time that I was ever in a position to focus on my writing without being distracted by work. I wasn’t completely over the Bay Area, but I was definitely over teaching there,” he said. “Being here in Oregon was a chance to start from scratch. After a year of being here, I just felt like I needed a little bit of that energy, that spirit that comes with being in the classroom.”
As Smith considered his reentry to academia, he discovered a number of his friends and classmates from graduate school were working at OSU. CLA’s Dr. Elizabeth Helman encouraged Smith to look into Oregon State’s theater program, and Smith soon started as an instructor at both the School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts and the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. “After one term, I was kind of hooked,” Smith said, “it was great to be back in the classroom and quite honestly, I very much admire the student body at OSU. They have a lot of curiosity and an incredible amount of intellectual humility. Every class I've had has been a complete and utter joy.”
In the spring of 2024, Smith’s most recent play The Fillmore Eclipse completed its San Francisco run at Honey Art Studio. In March 2025, Smith completed a script consultation for Elvis Evolution, which is scheduled to open in London this May. Smith is currently working on several projects, including a theatrical adaptation of Tyler Merritt’s memoir I Take My Coffee Black, as well as a play inspired by his son’s favorite childhood book, for which he recently acquired the rights to adapt. Smith is also developing an original speculative script about love, grief, and creation. The story follows a widower grappling with the loss of his wife and his feeling of abandonment after she refused chemotherapy to spend her final months writing a book. “It’s very different from anything I’ve written before,” Smith said. “It’s forcing me to see the world in new ways and take new risks which are foundational in creating art.”