Windsor native Vern Smith grew up twenty minutes from the green ghetto - an actual Detroit phenomenon. His fiction has appeared in Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McClelland & Stewart), as well as the Insomniac Press anthologies, Iced, Hard Boiled Love, and Revenge. His novelette, "The Gimmick," was a finalist for Canada's highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award. A veteran of four newspapers and three magazines, Smith's non-fiction has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, Eye, Broken Pencil, and Quill & Quire, among other publications. He most recently managed CJAM 99.1 FM, where he founded the twenty-four-hour radio marathon Joe Strummer Day to Confront Poverty in Windsor-Detroit. He now lives on the edge of Chicago where urban Illinois meets the prairie.
