Daniel Smith, a writer and psychotherapist, is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets, about the history and science of hearing voices, and the memoir Monkey Mind, a New York Times bestseller.
His articles, essays, and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, and numerous other publications.
Smith holds the Mary Ellen Donnelly Critchlow Endowed Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle, and he has also taught at Bryn Mawr College. From 2011 to 2012, he co-hosted the first six episodes of n+1 magazine's The n+1 Podcast. He was a guest on The Colbert Report in 2007; on NPR's Talk of the Nation in 2012; and on WTF with Marc Maron in 2012.
At MacDowell in 2002 and 2004, Smith was working on Muses, Madmen, and Prophets. In 2024, they worked toward the completion of a book, an autobiographical "natural history" of the negative emotions, to be published by Simon & Schuster.
