Owen Smith

Owen Smith is a MA candidate in the SUNY New Paltz English program. He graduated from the same institution with a BA in English earlier this year, and he is currently teaching in the Writing & Rhetoric department as he takes graduate courses. His creative and critical work revolves around modern, postmodern and contemporary literature, with a specific critical interest in poststructuralism as it relates to issues of language, reality and political power structures. His contribution to this symposium is a creative piece in which he reframes and rewrites one of Kafka’s best-known stories, “In The Penal Colony,” in the context of contemporary mass incarceration in the United States while preserving the absurdity, abstractness and anonymity of Kafka’s (and his translators’) language use. Owen aims to graduate in 2026.