Michael V. Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown teaching at UBC-Okanagan in BC's Interior.

In recent years, Smith won Vancouver's Community Hero of the Year Award and the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers. He's also won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, scooped two short film prize categories at Toronto's Inside Out festival, and was nominated for the Journey Prize.

His videos have played around the world, in cities such as Milan, Dublin, Turin, London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Geneva, Buenos Aires, SF, LA and Bombay. Smith is an MFA grad from UBC’s Creative Writing program.

Vancouver Magazine has considered him one of its city's 25 most influential gay citizens whereas Loop Magazine named him one of Vancouver’s Most Dangerous People...

Smith’s novel, Cumberland (Cormorant Books, 2002), was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His first book of poetry is What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006), short-listed for the ReLit Prize. Most recently, he's published a hybrid book of concrete poems/photographs, Body of Text (BookThug, 2008), created with David Ellingsen.

I’m not lingering over a turn of phrase here, but the fact of the book, the flipping through it, the returning to it, the showing it around, and finally, the wrapping my head around it, enjoying the pleasure of it, the tease of it, the let’s-see-if-we-can-get-away-with-this of it, makes me think about the queerness of concrete poetry. – Matrix Magazine, reviewing Body of Text