Alyssa Smith

Alyssa Smith is a content creator, curator, and convention founder. Currently, she serves as director of event programming at Ragan Communications where she recruits speakers for the full array of events, including the signature CommsWeek and Future of Communications Conference. Previously, she was the editorial director of an e-commerce startup, the founder of the New York-based special-effects event CONstruct, a senior editor at Time Inc. (now Dotdash Meredith) and the editor at Hearst Books. For the last two decades, she edited and written under multiple brands and on various platforms, including trade books, digital media, and newsstand products. In 2014, she founded the print Entertainment Weekly specials program, and produced nearly 100 issues over seven years, where she negotiated access to and interviewed high-profile talent... and spent a lot of her time on cover copy. She has written and edited for Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, People, Popular Mechanics, Country Living, the History Channel, LIFE magazine, Time, Veranda, House Beautiful, and many others.