BIO:

Michael V. Smith works across many creative genres. A writer, filmmaker and performer, he has been publishing books, doing drag, and making videopoems for over twenty-five years. An improv artist, Smith pulls magic out of the moment to bring people together, whether as a drag queen on stage, a writer or a literary VJ hosting live online, as a popular MC, or even in filmmaking where Smith leans into the moment, taking a cue from his great love Agnes Varda. A full professor in the interdisciplinary department of Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC, Smith teaches poetry, fiction, spoken word, editing and publishing, and writing with digital media.

WRITING:   In his latest book Soundtrack: a lyric memoir, Smith uses music albums as a memory device– spanning from Blondie’s Parallel Lines in 1978 to The Skinjobs’ 2003 Burn Your Rainbow. Soundtrack unpacks a kind of affective history of what it was like growing up at the turn of the millennium as a young queer person under the shadow of AIDS/HIV.

Released in Fall 2023 with Book*hug, Queers Like Me is a poetry collection about growing up as a small town queer.

A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Smith’s memoir My Body Is Yours (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015) has been translated into French and published by Éditeur TRIPTYQUE. Find Ceci est mon corps here. Translated by the amazing Benoît Laflamme. [Vous êtes francais/e? Cliquez ici pour plus d’information.] His first book of poetry What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006) was short-listed for the ReLit Prize. In 2008, he published a hybrid book of concrete poems/photographs, Body of Text (Book*hug), created with photographer David Ellingsen (prints are still for sale). His book of poetry BAD IDEAS was released in May, 2017, from Nightwood Editions. Smith’s second novel, Progress, was published in Spring 2011 with Cormorant Books. For more info, click books!

Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers. He’s won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Journey Prize. Smith’s novel, Cumberland (Cormorant Books, 2002), was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award.

FILM:  Smith’s most recent film project is The Floating Man, a feature documentary in which Smith ‘bares all’ to examine his gender construction, using his visual art and performance practice to examine a lifetime of untrue stories about his body. Smith has won a number of awards for both his film work and his writing.  “The Floating Man” won Director’s Choice at the Cinema Diverse festival in Palm Springs. “I Dream a Queer Allegory”, made in collaboration with R.M. Vaughan and friends, won Best Video by Poets in the Cadence Video Poetry Festival, 2021. As a member of the Miss Nomer Collective, their short film ‘Girl on Girl’ won both the Colin Campbell Award for Best Canadian Male Short and the Best Canadian Female Short Award at the Inside Out Festival in Toronto.

His videos have played around the world, in cities such as Milan, Dublin, Turin, London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Glasgow, Lisbon, Beirut, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, SF, LA and Bombay. Smith has screened work at the British Film Institute, at the Lincoln Center with the New York Video Festival, and in the Vancouver International Film Festival.

PERFORMANCE:  As a performer, Smith is known for his quick wit, bizarre costume choices, and his delicious invitations to play with the audience. A self-named ‘fuzzy drag queen’, Smith has been rocking his genderfluid hairy man’s body in drag decades before RuPaul’s Drag Race made room for bearded queens. Smith has appeared in dozens of cabarets and festivals: at Toronto’s VideoFag, Smith launched his memoir My Body Is Yours by playing an audience-participation game Polar Twin, in which he found the audience member with the least sexual experience in common with him. At the nGbK gallery in Berlin, Smith performed two pieces for a solo audience: an intimacy dance while blindfolded, so that each guest could slow dance with Smith and remain anonymous; and a confessional performance while wearing a hood, so that guests couldn’t see Smith’s face, as he used a telephone recording to reveal his naked body under his clothes, while detailing some of his long-standing body dysmorphia.  At the Junge Triebe Festival in Bielefeld, Germany and the 2011 Performance Studies International Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, Smith worked with colleagues devising street-performances using recorded sound, mostly juxtaposing urban landscapes with unexpected soundscapes. At the Vancouver Fringe Festival, the Entzaubert Festival in Berlin, Encuentro 2014 in Montreal, and the Vancouver Comedy Festival, Smith performed in drag his usual body-based stand up improv comedy. Smith is a consummate performer and host, in or out of drag.

COMMUNITY PRACTICE:  Working with Inspired Word Cafe, he organizes PONY, an annual queer cabaret and community fundraiser in Kelowna. Smith also co-presents the Student Okanagan Film Festival, in Kelowna, BC. Working with the now-defunct Living Positive Resource Centre, Smith produced a number of fundraising and community events. Lastly, Smith co-created and ran the Robson Reading Series for six years, hosting hundreds of writers in Vancouver during that time. Smith is deeply committed to community, in all his creative practices.

Find him on Instagram, TikTok, and Substack.

Other MVS highlights:

live broadcasts:

Check out past LIVE BROADCASTS from MVS’s storytelling show, Have I told you the one about… At the start of the pandemic, MVS told “true stories for adult audiences” each night, live on YouTube for over two months. Some special guests also appear, with their own amazing stories.

MVS in “Have I told you the one about” (photo credit: Conrad Johnston)

new film: The Floating Man

new chapbook: Grandma Cooper’s Corpse

In this stunning, genre-bending poetic monologue, Smith uses his expert narrative skills to recount the hilarious yet heartbreaking family tale of trying to locate his estranged grandmother’s corpse. Smith moves easily between tragedy and comedy creating a dynamic and complex portrait of a family who—despite living in close proximity in their small Ontario town—are torn apart by rivalry, resentment, poverty, and mental illness.

—Kathryn Mockler, publisher of the online climate journal Watch Your Head