American writer and editor who co-wrote licensed novels across several Star Trek series, often with Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and edited the ten Strange New Worlds anthologies of fan-submitted stories.
Dean Wesley Smith wrote most of his Star Trek novels with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Their joint work includes The Escape, one of the first original Voyager novels, The Rings of Tautee for the Original Series, Echoes for Voyager, written with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and By the Book (2002), the first original novel based on Enterprise.
He also wrote the Next Generation novel A Hard Rain, a Dixon Hill story, under his own name alone.
From 1998 to 2007 Smith edited Strange New Worlds, an annual anthology whose stories were chosen from an open contest for writers without professional credits. Several later regulars of the fiction line, Dayton Ward among them, were first published there.