Naomi Gladish Smith was born in England to American parents who returned to the U.S. with their five children at the beginning of WWII. The family led a peripatetic life until settling in a Chicago suburb.

After years of publishing essays and fiction, the essays in venues as varied as The Christian Science Monitor and JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), she wrote three novels about the afterlife and most recently a memoir of her father, V as in Victor.

For a number of years she took great pride in braving the Chicago weather, but now flees to Florida for the winter months.