Max Wolf Valerio is a trans man, and a mixed Blackfoot/Sephardic poet, performer, and writer. He has appeared in a number of documentaries, including the Max short in Monika Treut’s Female Misbehavior. He featured in several feature films, including Unhung Heroes, in which he plays a pansexual artistic transman who dreams of exhibiting sculptures of his penis, and Gendernauts. Valerio’s writing has been published in This Bridge Called My Back (pre-transition under his former name, Anita Valerio), This Bridge We Call Home, Male Lust: Pleasure, Power, and Transformation, Transgender Care, Body Alchemy, and The Phallus Palace.

Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and writer, and a long-transitioned man of transsexual history. He identifies primarily as an individual although his ancestry is Northern European, American Indian (Blackfoot Confederacy- Blood/Kainai band) on his mother's side, and his father is Hispano from Northern New Mexico and descended from the Conversos and crypto-Jews of the Sephardic diaspora following the Expulsion. A chapbook Animal Magnetism (eg press) appeared in 1984. He read and performed his poems to music and in featured readings in San Francisco throughout the 70s and 80s at places like Intersection for the Arts, CoLab, Valencia Tool and Die, the San Francisco Art Institute, and The Marshall Weber Gallery (now ATA). Recent poetry includes: Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity--a long poem set to ambient music and excerpted in Yellow Medicine Review and made possible by a Native American Arts and Cultural Traditions Grants (NAACT) from the San Francisco Arts Commission; a collaboration with photographer and painter Dana Smith, Mission Mile Trilogy +1; poems in the anthology TROUBLING THE LINE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER POETRY AND POETICS (Nightboat Books, 2013). His memoir, The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) was a Lambda Finalist for 2006. His latest book of poetry is THE CRIMINAL: THE INVISIBILITY OF PARALLEL FORCES (EOAGH Books, 2019).