Lindsey J. Smith is a freelance journalist and essayist raised in rural Sonoma County and based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing explores how global warming is changing our relationships with the places we love. She is currently writing her first book, to be published in 2026 by University of California Press. The book, a work of narrative journalism and personal essay, surveys climate change in California and explores the complex but hopeful idea of managed retreat as a possible response to wildfire, sea level rise, and coastal erosion.

Lindsey is also the managing editor of DeSmog, a publication committed to reporting on climate denial and disinformation, and a 2022 Kiplinger Fellow and a Brown Handler Writers Resident. She has published work in BBC, Smithsonian, The Verge, Pacific Standard, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco magazine, Undark, and Wild Hope, among others.

In 2019 and 2020 she served as the editorial operations and research director at Alta. In 2017 and 2018, she was the associate editor at San Francisco magazine, where she dove deep into San Francisco’s struggle with public injection drug use, California’s imperiled kelp forests, and the fertility industry, among other topics. At San Francisco, she was a proud member of the team that won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2018.

Lindsey got her master's in journalism from New York University's Literary Reportage program, where she won the New York Press Club's Stan Brooks Memorial Scholarship. In 2023 and 2017, she was a finalist for the Metcalf Institute's Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists. In addition to writing, she works as a freelance editor and has taught fact-checking workshops at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is represented by Jonah Straus of Straus Literary.

Photo by Kelsey Lannin, 2020.

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