Iris Smyles is the author of Iris Has Free Time (Soft Skull Press 2013), which Forbes called, “an instant classic… a smart, funny, wise, and sometimes heartbreaking book about a slowly fizzling love affair with youth,” and Dating Tips for the Unemployed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2016), a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, BOMB, Paris Review Daily, and The Baffler among other publications, and have been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2016, True Tales of Love and Lust, Heads and Tails, and Icons in Ash: Human Portraits.
Smyles edited and wrote the afterword for the cult book The Capricious Critic by Ari Martin Samsky, a collection of humorous essays she commissioned for her web-museum, Smyles & Fish. She penned the “Sheets to the Wind” column for The East Hampton Star, and is a frequent contributor to Splice Today.
In 2013, Michael Almereyda directed a short film about her called, “At Home with Iris Smyles.”
Her third book, Droll Tales (Turtle Point Press, July 2022) has been described as “delightfully weird.”
Born and raised in New York, she lives in the North of England and Greece.
Photo by Chris Stein