About Words Like Silver

Pay no attention to the girl behind the curtain.

By Grace Smith

Published July 1, 2024

Although Words Like Silver gets the best of me, I am of course doing about sixteen different projects at any given time—as reflected by the interests that make it onto this page. You can find more below.

For More

my work
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My Literary Representation

My novels and their film rights are represented by William Morris Endeavor. You can reach out to Rikki Bergman and Eve Attermann with any inquiries.

rbergman@wmeagency.com
eattermann@wmeagency.com

Hey y'all!

I’m a twenty-seven year old reader and writer from Tampa, Florida. I left the sunshine to study history and studio art at W&L in Virginia, graduating in May 2020.

I’ve lived in Honolulu, in New York City, and in Park City. Nowadays, I'm based on the North Shore of O'ahu, Hawai'i — in Waialua.

For work, I’m a freelance writer and editor at magazines and publications. I write travel, lifestyle, commerce, style, and entertainment across publications like Travel + Leisure, Lonely Planet, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, PEOPLE, Cosmopolitan, Well+Good, and more. You can find more of my work here, albeit rarely updated. I’m deeply interested in the psychology of aesthetics, and that framework often grounds my writing.

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Words Like Silver was established in April 2011 when I, in true middle school fashion, needed an outlet. It gets its name from my penchant for “silver-tongued” writers and lyrical prose. You can read a good chunk of its origin story here.

Book-wise, I started my book coverage within young adult fiction because it’s where I find the most variety (and because of my age at the time.) I love high-concept commercial with a literary voice and a strong sense of place, but read widely across both YA and adult. I read fiction and nonfiction, classics and modern works, literary and commercial, those I agree with and those I don't.

Nowadays, I describe my journalism as the study of what we find beautiful and why it's meaningful to us. That impacts a lot of the subtopics and common threads you'll find across various book recs: nature, gratitude, travel, the arts, solitude, resonance, connection, etc,.

In nonfiction, I go down rabbit holes and devour books on specific topics that catch my fancy. (I’m often reading Brain Pickings — now The Marginalian — or Aeon for inspiration.) Predictably, I read a lot of psychology, philosophy, and social histories.

I’ve been running this blog since I was thirteen, so have been involved in publishing for a minute. By now, I've been operating for almost 14 years and often joke that I was grandfathered in; I've witnessed the breakout hits, the sweeping trends, the shifts, and am forever grateful for this ecosystem and the people within it. I hope and expect it to be a lifelong pursuit! For more on how and why WLS is expanding, you can read about its recent makeover.

When not reading, writing, or making art, I’m probably out in nature, exercising, playing an instrument (badly), or beelining to the closest dance studio or dance floor. I’m a hobbyist at heart, and passionate about anything expressive.

For further specifics, you can stalk my portfolio.

A Note on My Editorial Process

Another note: it's just me here. No team or external help, besides my fantastic developer Chris Oka (highly recommend) who built the site, code, formatting. Of course, I am so, so grateful for all the personal and professional support within my life that gives me the capability to build WLS independently.

That being said, I'm pretty relaxed on-site. WLS has always been an outlet for me to express without limit, so I don't edit my work or publish my articles with baked-in time to review with fresh eyes. 99% of what you read here is a first draft that I think of, write, and publish all in a row—most likely within a few hours. Think of my musings as reflections rather than reported work.

Pretty much as soon as something goes up, I find a typo—or in some cases, ages later. I do a pass of screenshotting and correcting them about once a week when I have a spare moment, but there might be a few small errors you'll notice in the meantime.

So frankly, I think my writing here might be better than in other places because it's truer to my interests and synthesizes my reads/thoughts/personality in such a powerful way. But! My articles for magazines and other publications are much cleaner because I hold myself to a very different standard within my deliverables and undergo a more robust editorial process from brainstorming to execution.

So if you catch a typo, grammatical error, repetition, or some other quality you don't like, feel free to flag to me if that would make you feel better, but just know WLS does not align with my traditional journalism or authorship in that way—which is also perhaps a factor that has allowed me to run it for 14+ years without burning out on or resenting the workflow in the way I do sometimes within my day job and career. Just let it happen!

A Note on Buying Books

Amazon is terrible for the book industry. Originally, I had a paragraph blurb of explanation here, but it turned into a long, long rant and explanation about the dangers of devaluing books and systemically reducing our access to literature—and ability to create art, on the creative side.

Current Short Bio, If You Need—

Grace Smith is a journalist and book reviewer whose work appears in PEOPLE, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, and more. She got her start on the book blog she founded in the seventh grade—and still runs 14 years later. Her fiction, poetry, and academic research in English have earned awards and recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Washington & Lee University. Her coverage reaches over a million readers across digital platforms, but you can also find her on Instagram (@wlsgrace) or at www.wordslikesilver.com.