Photo by Nabor Godoy
Judith Small studied music and French at Oberlin College, where she earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Honors in Romance Languages, and taught high school in Lille, France, as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. She has an M.A.T. in secondary education from Harvard University, where she studied poetry writing with Elizabeth Bishop, and an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in creative writing.
Second Tongue, a sequence of poems growing out of Small's interpreting experience, was awarded the 2017 Brighthorse Prize in Poetry and was published in November 2019 by Brighthorse Books. A finalist for the FIELD Poetry Prize, the Georgia Poetry Prize and the Idaho Prize for Poetry, the sequence was excerpted in the 2016 Fall/Winter issue of Epiphany.
Small's additional publications include poetry, fiction and essays in The New Yorker, FIELD, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, Five Fingers Review, Feminist Studies, New Letters and other magazines and anthologies, as well as a book, From the Island, a mixed-genre memoir (Black Oyster Press). She has received the Fels Award from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the Poetry Northwest Young Poet's Prize, the San Francisco Browning Society Award and two Pushcart Prize nominations.
Small has held lectureship positions in creative writing and poetry at San Francisco State University and at the State University of New York (Continuing Education), Purchase. She has taught English and French at School-within-a-School, Brookline High School, Brookline, Massachusetts (where she was chosen by students as one of ten "model teachers"), and in the Independent Study Program at Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California. From 2017 through 2019 Small coordinated the after-school Peer Interpreters Program at Oakland’s Castlemont High School, where bilingual students from immigrant families learned the fundamentals of interpreting as they supported newcomer students and their families.
Small has several decades of experience as a senior corporate and tax paralegal at the San Francisco law firms of Morrison & Foerster and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. While at Morrison & Foerster, she was a co-founder and co-coordinator of the firm's award-winning partnership, through San Francisco School Volunteers, with Bessie Carmichael Elementary School. Most recently, Small served from 2009-2015 as a senior paralegal at Adler & Colvin, a law firm in San Francisco working exclusively with nonprofit organizations and their donors.