Michael F. Smith is a native Mississippian who has lived throughout the Southeast and spent considerable time living abroad in France and Switzerland. He has been awarded the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature, and the Brick Streets Press Short Story Award. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies. He has been invited to read his work at multiple venues, from Boston to Manhattan to Montrichard, France. His first novel, The Hands of Strangers, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing in Charlotte, North Carolina.
He attended Mississippi State University and later the Center for Writers at Southern Miss. In between, he took his first job with the NBA, working with its outdoor streetball festival, Hoop-It-Up. After only a few months in Dallas, he jumped at the opportunity to move to Western Europe and work on the road crew with the European version of Hoop-It-Up. Over the next few years, he traveled extensively in Western Europe, working in and visiting the countries of France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Switzerland, and more. It was during this time, riding the trains, and spending evenings at his apartment without the luxury of television, that he began to read, and read some more. Which then led to the idea that he’d like to try and write some of his own stories.
His own work is naturally influenced by Southern writers – Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, Barry Hannah, William Faulkner, and so on. Like most writers, his beginnings focused on the short story, but in the last few years he has turned towards the novel and The Hands of Strangers is his first published novel.
He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters, in a self-renovated Victorian home that was built in 1878. He teaches creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. Feel free to contact the author: michael@michaelfsmith.com
