About Sam
S. D. Smith is the author of The Green Ember Series, a million+ selling adventure saga featuring heroic #RabbitsWithSwords. The Green Ember spent time as the number one bestselling audiobook in the world on Audible. He is also the author of the madcap Mooses with Bazookas: And Other Stories Children Should Never Read as well as the touching throwback adventure, The Found Boys. Finally, he has co-authored two fantasy adventure novels with his son (J. C. Smith), Jack Zulu and the Waylander’s Key and Jack Zulu and the Girl with Golden Wings. Smith’s stories are captivating readers across the globe who are hungry for “new stories with an old soul.”
Though packed with old school virtue and moral imagination, Smith doesn’t merely create “safe” stories, but bold, daring, truthful tales of light that help shape children who become dangerous—dangerous to the darkness.
Smith is a founder and owner of Story Warren, a publishing, events, and IP development house based in rural West Virginia. Story Warren exists to serve families as “allies in imagination.”
S. D. Smith lives in Grandview, West Virginia with his wife and four kids.
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The Green Ember: Origin Story
There were rabbits in the yard…
I was on the porch with my young daughter, and it was time for one of our stories. I often told her tales from out of my mind, improvised in the moment for her delight. Today felt different, and I scanned the natural beauty seen everywhere around us in West Virginia and found these furry, vulnerable creatures hopping around. So it began.
The stories we started that day were about a rabbit family caught up in a surprising, epic adventure. Joined by little brother, we shared this narrative at bedtimes, on walks, and at other stolen moments. These tales carried on for years and became our own private serial adventures. What my daughter and I didn’t know that first day, and would only learn years later, was that hundreds of thousands of children would one day share our little adventure—that it would outgrow the hills of West Virginia and make its way onto every continent on earth. We couldn’t have known then that a surprising adventure awaited us as well, an adventure in hospitality, sharing our stories with families around the world.
Like the seemingly harmless rabbits of our Appalachian landscape, we never expected to see our stories rise and fight. But hope is worth fighting for, and these are stories anchored in hope.
