Born in Menominee, Michigan, in 1931, Patrick Smith was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force and an engineering writer for General Motors before returning to graduate school at the University of California, Davis, where he completed a PhD in modern literature in 1965. He taught English at the University of San Francisco for 30 years (1966-1996), and during that time he founded a small poetry publishing house, Pancake Press (1974), began studying art (1984), and began exhibiting his work (1994).