The Faculty Senate has chosen Kyle Smith, an English professor at the Abilene campus of Cisco College, to be the first spotlight employee for the academic year.
Kyle attended Cisco College as an undergraduate and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in screenwriting at the University of Texas in Austin.
At Cisco College, he now teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and Business and Technical Writing. He said he especially enjoys encouraging and working with nontraditional students “as I was once one myself.”
In July of this year, Kyle was invited to participate in a creative writing workshop in Paris, France. He had submitted a manuscript excerpt and was one of nine writers selected for the Paris fiction workshop by Writing Workshops Dallas. Three writers came from New York City, and one each from Woodstock, San Francisco, and Seattle. Kyle was the sole Texas representative. Two others bowed out at the last minute and were not replaced.
“It was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had,” Kyle said of his Paris experience. “For the first time in my life, I felt more extroverted than introverted. I wanted to be with and talk to these people all day and night—about books, food, politics, movies, Paris, art, life, love—and that’s exactly what we did.
“After taking walking and biking tours, and a riverboat down the Seine, it was easy to see how this city inspired and brought together so many historical literary figures.”
At the Paris meeting, he workshopped two short stories in Paris with a cohort of six fiction writers and Marie Helene-Bertino, author of the novels Parakeet and 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas.
“One of the stories I workshopped is about a young, dissatisfied wife who becomes increasingly dependent on her phone’s witchcraft app,” Kyle said. “The other is an unconventional revenge story. Both are set in the same small town in West Texas. I know the culture and climate of this fictional place, having grown up in Baird.”
This spring at the Abilene campus, Kyle Smith will teach a Creative Writing class which features the writing of short screenplays, one of which will be filmed for a final class project. He taught a similar class last spring; the script “Surreal Cereal” won unanimously and was turned into a film as the final class project.