A C Smart

A.C. Smart, aka Barbara Forman, made her first professional sale, "Broken Canes," to Meisha Merlin’s Bending the Landscape horror anthology (2001). As she was teaching at an inner-city middle school at the time, she used the pseudonym Alexi Smart. Subsequent professional sales were in the fantasy genre as A.C. Smart: "Havoc" and "Bellwether," both published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Since then, she has achieved both a Bachelor's and Master's in forensic anthropology, supplementing previous degrees in biology and psychology. Having left behind the 100-to-148-hour work weeks (that was not a typo) required to pay for said degrees, she has settled into a database-research position which she enjoys and describes as "working puzzles." She volunteers at a food bank, attends fossil-club field trips, SCUBA dives, trains cats, and has again taken up the pen. The taphonomy studies in her yard are placed so as not to disturb the neighbors, but the WV DNR has found her queries disconcerting. Her parents live in Oklahoma, where they homesteaded when the author was a teen. She schedules trips home around both Soonercon and the Murray County Antique Tractor and Implement Association Tractor show & Fall Festival each September, for which she also volunteers.