Jerry Douglas Smith, San Luis Obispo’s New Poet Laureate November 6, 2012: From The Tribune: Once, while hiking in the Sequoia National Forest, San Luis Obispo poet laureate Jerry Douglas Smith came face to face with a grumpy black bear. “I came around this redwood tree and this bear was on this berm,” he recalled, no more than 10 feet away. “I surprised him…. I was in his social distance, so he was [...] by Harriet Staff