Michael Warr

Michael Warr’s books of poetry include Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), and from Tia Chucha Press The Armageddon of FunkWe Are All The Black Boy, and others. In 2017 the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library named him a Library Laureate. In 2015 he received a Creative Work Fund award for his digital poetry project “Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview-Hunters Point,” where he spent his early childhood. Working with digital artist Mark Sabb, Michael is integrating his own poetry with digital visual platforms (video, photography, social media, archival materials, etc.), he is searching for and telling his family story, starting at the top of the Hill on Dormitory and Kiska Rd., while also working with youth and their families, at the Bayview YMCA to create their own mixture of poetic storytelling with digital images.

Michael has also received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award (BCALA), Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and an NEA Fellowship for Poetry. His poems have been widely anthologized in books, journals, and recordings, both nationally and internationally. His digital photo/poetry performance, Poetic Aperture – An African American Interprets Africa, based on his poetry and photojournalism in Africa, debuted at The Field Museum in Chicago. Currently his poetry is being translated into Mandarin as part of the “Two Languages / One Community” project in collaboration with poet, novelist, translator, and scientist Chun Yu.

A frequent collaborator with musicians, visual and performing artists, his poems have been dramatized on stage, depicted on canvas, and set to music. He is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and Principal at WarrConsulting, where he assists nonprofits as an Organizational Management Consultant.