Michael Dwayne Smith

Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a ghost town in the Mojave Desert with his wife, rescued horses, and Calamity the California calico cat. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Shaking Music from the Angry Air” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). He’s a recipient of both the Hinderaker Poetry Prize and the Polonsky Prize for fiction; other nominations include three for the Pushcart Prize, three for Best of the Net, and one for the StorySouth Million Writers Award. His work appears widely in journals, magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and newspapers around the world, including The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Heron Tree, Star 82 Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Superstition Review, Monkeybicycle, Chiron Review, San Pedro River Review, and Heavy Feather Review.

A graduate of the creative writing program at U.C. Riverside, he also holds a Masters Degree in Educational Technology from Pepperdine University. He is Professor Emeritus of Education and Educational Technology at Victor Valley College, and, when not writing or teaching, he serves as publisher/editor-in-chief of Mojave River Press & Review, as well as on the Advisory Boards of both Quartet Literary Journal and The Journal of the Plague Years. He's previously served as editor-in-chief of the literary journals Cease Cows and Mosaic, as guest editor of Cholla Needles Literary Journal, and as judge for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in book-length collections.

An avid reader, he is also a lover of music, basketball, photography, and fine whiskies. His photographs have been published, as well as many reviews/tasting notes on Scotch and American whiskies. He watches basketball more than playing these days and enjoys listening to his wide-ranging collection of audio recordings, which spans across all genres from the 19th century to present day, and from anthropological field recordings to more than 10,000 musical studio albums. It's not uncommon for him to be writing under the simultaneous influences of brilliant music and brilliant whisky.

His most recent books have garnered much praise. On "Shaking Music from the Angry Air" (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) literary luminaries have said:

Love—the agony, the ecstasy, the quest—love as the stay against death is the song of Shaking Music from the Angry Air. It is sung along the highways, in the barrooms, in the bedrooms, of Southern California. “Poem in Which I Survive,” is a standout. The first line: “I wake wondering why I am horizontal on my birthday.” Read this terrific book and find the answer.

—Donna Hilbert, author of Enormous Blue Umbrella

Poet Michael Dwayne Smith writes, “I take the fullness of life and death equal.” Set mostly in the American West, these poems journey through desert and cities alike, by turns lush and haunting like the landscape. Taken from a wide range of cultural figures, from Oscar Wilde to Etta James, Smith tries to make sense of one’s lifelong experiences, the cyclical nature of disillusionment and hope, regrets and desires. What accumulates is a book about living, told in a voice that’s furious, lyrical, and elegiac.

—Pui Ying Wong, author of Fanling in October

Shaking Music from the Angry Air by Michael Dwayne Smith is a fantastic collection filled with vivid imagery, amazing insight, and compelling references to the arts which inspired the journey.

—Ellyn Maybe, poet, musician, and lyricist

Michael Dwayne Smith gives us a brilliant, rollicking account of a life threaded from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert, from boyhood to manhood. His observations are often tough and direct like the people he writes about, but also leavened with an earned grace, and a clear-eyed look at the music of love and poetry, the dazzle he finds in horses and coyotes. Jim Harrison would have loved these poems, applauding like Smith this “magical desperate quality to everything.”

—Tim Suermondt, author of A Doughnut and the Great Beauty of the World

Michael Dwayne Smith’s collection, Shaking Music from the Angry Air, is a tough, muscular ride. Grit your teeth, hold tight. Love and death loom even as you find “little tides and pools of promise” to somehow buoy you. This is a story of orange groves, warm beer, lust, and living through stuff to witness “distant laments, strange and precious.” You’re “dying upward” while “finding beauty in the breakdown.” This is a ride you’ll remember.

—Carolyn Adams, author of Going Out to Gather

Michael Dwayne Smith’s Shaking Music from the Angry Air is an ultra-rich, self-revelatory and confessional tapestry of familial alcoholic disturbances, youthful desert desires, disappointments and starlit joy, a wolf howl through the chaos of growing up in unforgiving Southern California dreamscapes and Mojave mirage. The entire collection, Smith’s fourth, is buttressed throughout on masterfully crafted language, a scaffolding of humor, pathos, sexiness, cigarettes, lust and rust. The imagery and metaphors are deft and potent, daring, deliciously surprising, with sentences that read like smooth aged Scotch, crisp and wild, surreal, funny and bittersweet by turns, with tales of girls, women, and male longing sketched with vivid colors, riding on wild horses, falling into potent remorse. This is a damned serious collection of dazzling poems, each of which arrests the reader’s soul and never releases it from their grasp.

—Jeffrey Bryant, author of The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers

I enjoy reading and rereading Michael Dwayne Smith’s excellent poetry in Shaking Music from The Angry Air. In one poem he says, “My words make a ceiling I keep revising.” I feel that I stand under that ceiling, marveling at it. The poems often root deeply in memory. Many make reference to California. Smith can paint a sad situation, but moments of humor impact and surprise us. This book is a joy.

—Kenneth Pobo, author of At the Window, Silence

Michael Dwayne Smith’s new collection opens with a stunner of a poem, loaded with vivid imagery and sharp, pointed observations and phrases that twist and surprise the reader. Smith manages to keep the intensity and freshness alive in his collection, spanning the sprawling California landscape whether in the streets of Los Angeles, the isolation of the Mojave Desert, or the lonely highways that lead to divergent points on the map and connect the flawed humans that inhabit that world. These poems offer a kaleidoscope of colors, images, and metaphors that startle. There is a sense of loss and hope, regret and delight, with an overriding layer of compassion and humor. In turn, surreal, compassionate, humorous, hopeful, and heartbreaking, these poems will stay with you. As Smith says in his poem “Maybe, Maybe”, There’s a kind of immortality to my dreams.

—Michael Minassian, author of Jack Pays a Visit and 1000 Pieces of Time

This poetry burns with energy, urgency, and an unflinching honesty that won’t let you look away. Each piece in Shaking Music from the Angry Air is a heartbeat, a protest, a submission woven with sharp perspective and raw emotions. Just when you think the work becomes too heavy, his words crack open a sliver of light, an “ah-ha” moment, a spark of humor. These are poems that demand your attention.

—Linda Goin, author of She-Oak

Of his 2017 collection, "Roadside Epiphanies," Pulitzer Prize nominee Susan Tepper writes, "This book of poems by Michael Dwayne Smith is an intense yet down to earth read, infused with mysticism, love, humor and the search for what is crucial to decent existence ... A highly recommended book." Jeffrey Alfier, acclaimed poet, co-editor of Blue Horse Press and winner of the Kithara Book Prize writes: "He renders to us the world at large - the universe in a cholla needle, something of Blake’s world in a grain of sand. There is much to admire in the depth and breadth of Smith’s lines. His striking and eloquent control of language and image make this collection of poems a delight to behold."