My name is Mike Smith, and I am the writer of "My Strange New Mexico." I am twenty-eight years old, and in the picture below you can see what I might look like if I were placed upon some sort of shelf, in an abandoned restaurant.
For most of my life, I have lived in New Mexico, loved New Mexico, loved history, loved the West, and loved to write.
As a teenager I moved alone to Alaska where I spent a year-and-a-half hitchhiking all around the state, worked as a commercial fisherman, and lived in a tent in the woods before hitchhiking back down to the lower forty-eight states.
In 1999 and 2000 I spent almost seven months becoming the only person so far to circumnavigate the entire 1,960-mile shoreline of Lake Powell, in Utah and Arizona, in a canoe. In 2001, my younger brother, four other friends, and I walked over 3,500 miles from Key West, Florida to Cape Gaspé, Quebec, to raise money for charity.
In 2002, I moved into a fourteen-foot-long travel trailer on an isolated piece of Arizona desert, in the shadow of a windmill, where I lived as a hermit with my cat and wrote a screenplay. Some time later I got married in a Sandoval County, New Mexico cactus field, and moved back to the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico where I had grown up.
I currently live with my wife and two children in Albuquerque, where I am currently enrolled as an English major (with a minor in History) at the University of New Mexico.
I am determined to make a career as a writer. I have sold a screenplay to an independent film company, written articles for numerous magazines, and I am the author of a book, Towns of the Sandia Mountains, available online and elsewhere. I have been told it's a real page-turner.