Michael Farris Smith

Michael Farris Smith is heralded as a twenty-first-century answer to southern fiction’s gothic tradition. He was born in McComb in 1970 to a religious family, his father a Southern Baptist preacher. He credits his early experiences in the church for his stories of darkness and struggle alongside miracles and redemption, as well as his lyrical, gospel-esque writing style. Writing across hard realism, “grit lit,” and dystopian genres, Smith is often compared to Cormac McCarthy, though he credits Mississippi’s Larry Brown as his major influence.

Smith’s family moved several times during his childhood before settling in Magnolia. He played baseball at Southwest Mississippi Community College and went on to receive his Bachelor of Arts in communication with a concentration in public relations in 1994 from Mississippi State University. A chance job with an outdoor basketball festival took Smith to Europe, and he spent time in Paris and Geneva. It was there, in his twenties, that Smith began to read in earnest and to consider a career in writing. At the age of twenty-nine, Smith returned to Mississippi with new goals, and new distance, both literal and emotional, between his friends, family, and the life he had anticipated. For the next ten years, Smith wrote, endured rejection, married, earned his MEd from William Carey College and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, published short stories and essays, and had two daughters. In 2011, Main Street Rag Press published Smith’s novella, The Hands of Strangers. His first novel, Rivers, followed in 2013.

Published by Simon and Schuster, Rivers landed on several Best Books of 2013 lists. The novel, a climate-fiction representation of lawlessness on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during an unending succession of storms, established Smith’s style and subject matter. In 2017, Smith followed with Desperation Road, the converging stories of an ex-con and a desperate mother, both struggling to survive under challenging socioeconomic conditions in Mississippi. Over the course of his following five novels, Smith continued to chronicle the plights of the downtrodden in both contemporary and dystopian milieu, from the Delta-borne violence of The Fighter (2018) and the mythical kudzu of Blackwood (2020) to the religious and ecological extremism of Rivers’s quasi-prequel Salvage This World (2023). During this time, Smith also taught as an associate professor of English and creative writing at Auburn University and at Mississippi University for Women.

The most notable departure from Smith’s typical subject matter comes in his sixth novel, a prequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, titled Nick. Nick was published by Little, Brown and Company on 5 January 2021, just four days after the 1925 classic entered the public domain. He wrote Nick in secret in 2015, without any consideration of the copyright issue. Having been an expat himself—and sensing an equivalency between the sensibilities of the Jazz Age and his own time—Smith felt a kinship with The Great Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick, a character study, details Carraway’s youth in the Midwest and his experience in World War I. Though an admirer of Fitzgerald’s novel, Smith was frustrated by the gaps in the narrator’s personal history and interested in the “scars along the way” that shaped his worldview.

In 2023, two of Smith’s novels were made into feature films: Desperation Road and The Fighter, the latter retitled Rumble Through the Dark. Following these experiences, Smith went on to direct a short film, Chasing Rabbits, based on his story of that title. In addition to writing fiction and screenplays, Smith is the frontman of Oxford-based band the Smokes. He wrote all the songs on their EP, Lostville, which was released in 2024. Smith lives in Oxford with his wife and daughters.