So, who is this weirdo?

Max Wolf Valerio is a transman and an American Indian (Blackfoot)/Latino Sephardic poet, performer, and writer.  He has been writing and reading his work in public for over thirty years.  Originally a poet only, his first and only poetry chapbook appeared in 1984, Animal Magnetism (eg press).   Max's early poetry (age 20), was quoted by Adrienne Rich in her essay, Blood, Bread, and Poetry ("I am listening, A Lyric of Roots"), and later, collected by avant-garde New York school poet Bernadette Mayer.  Max hung out with the Beats in the mid-seventies into the early eighties,  including Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.  His many influences include not only the Beats, but  the later  Language poets, various visionary traditions both post-modern and tribal, William Blake, the spirit and rebellion of the French Symbolists, Sade, Bataille, Celan, Bob Dylan, punk rock, William Burroughs, JG Ballard, Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Emily Dickinson, H.D, the imagists and the Objectivists, industrial ambient word collage, Bukowski, and as well as the open insurrection and  dream anarchy of Surrealism and Dada.   Max has only recently begun to write prose, and his first book, is a memoir of his biological and social transition from female to male.  Prose influences in the arena of autobiographical journey include Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac.    

He loves music., and has worked with musicians including Frank Discussion and Jayed Scotti of the Feederz, and Timothy O'Neill.  

Max has appeared at many venues over the past thirty-one years, including being a featured poet in the late seventies to late eighties at The Intersection for the Arts, reading poetry at The SF Art Institute, and performing his poetry with a band at ATA.   He mostly abandoned reading poetry in public  after beginning his sex change process, but hopes to begin again soon.  His poetry has little to do with gender and he is happy for it.  

Max has appeared in a number of  documentaries, including the Max short in Monika Truet's Female Misbehavior and Gendernauts. He has also acted in several films, including Unhung Heroes and Healing Sex. Valerio's essays and other prose have been published in  many places including:  This Bridge Called My Back (pre-transition);  This Bridge We Call Home; Male Lust; Transgender Care; The Blythe House Quarterly (online, TNT,  Transgender Warriors; and The Phallus Palace.  He was also photographed for Body Alchemy; and The Phallus Palace. His memoir, The Testosterone Files, has just been published by Seal Press.  

He is planning to publish the nearly five books of poetry he has been storing in boxes for the past thirty years, one by one, in due time.  Max is hoping this time will be soon!  A procrastinator and dreamer, like all good dreamers, Max entertains many interests, and more of these will appear on this website in time.  These include a very serious interest in Afro-Caribbean religions, Sephardic Judaism, American Indian spiritual traditions, the Western Occult and Gnostic traditions, and Buddhism.   He studied with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the seventies and early eighties.  Of course, he has an ongoing interest in sexual politics and feminism.  Although he is a "person of color", Max is mostly an exile and feels disenfranchised  from that political context; he is searching for new paradigms.   

Ultimately, Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclast and a half-blood Plains Indian (Kainai band of the Blackfoot Confederacy), who believes very much in the singular and solitary vision quest journey.  He has touched the surface of these post-tribal  visions in his  writing life,  and explored their expansion in his life as  a poet.    

Max Valerio lives in San Francisco; his day job is enterprise software sales.