MICHAEL WARR BIO
Michael Warr’s recent literary honors include a 2024 San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Arts Impact Endowment Award, 2023/2021 SFAC Artist Award, 2023 Library Laureate Award from the San Francisco Public Library, and 2020 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the Poetry Editor of the anthology Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W.
His other books – all from Tia Chucha Press -- include The Armageddon of Funk which the Black Caucus of the American Library Association described as “A poetic soundtrack to black life;” Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex, as a co-editor with Julie Parson Nesbitt and Luis Rodriguez; and his first collection We Are All The Black Boy. His poetry is translated into Chinese by poet Chun Yu as part of their Two Languages / One Community project including his serial poem on police killings “What Not To Do (an unfinished poem)” which is published in the anthology Black Fire -- This Time (Willow Books 2022) and updated online in English and Chinese at Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Since 2018 he has been adding names to the poem mostly of Black people unjustly killed by the police. Most recently he has also been published in Poetry Northwest (in English and Chinese), Light on the Walls of Life—a tribute anthology to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tarot in Pandemic & Revolution, and Reimagine America – an anthology for the future. Other honors include a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and more. In his twenties Michael worked as a foreign correspondent based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he freelanced for New Africa, the BBC and the Economist. He is a former Deputy Director at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and serves on the board of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Follow his public appearances, consulting, and creative projects at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/. ABOUT PAGE
The Armageddon of Funk page was originally created to promote my second book of the same title, published by Tia Chucha Press in 2012. I eventually expanded the scope of the page to promote “things of interest” in the poetry world, including goings-on in the lives of poets, their methods of distribution, whether paper, digital, performative, audio, on canvas, film, installations, collaborative, or otherwise, and other poetry-related paraphernalia. Since joining the board of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, I am also posting book and library related information on this page. If you are looking to push poetry via my digital stream, it is more likely to make an appearance on The Armageddon of Funk than my Profile or my pages focused on police killings and the contributors to my anthology Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, the related group page, or my tracking fascist tendencies at Know This. For more about The Armageddon of Funk (the book), keep reading. Tracking a nonlinear trek across terrain as distinct as Timbuktu and Baton Rouge, and beliefs as “contrary” as Christianity and Communism, in The Armageddon of Funk Michael Warr manages to interconnect a world of opposites. Via “poetic memoir” we join his navigation through the “apolitical,” rigid morality of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; the revolutionary theories and free love of Black Panthers and Marxists; the promise of a bourgeois future from bank executives; a screaming soldier brandishing an AK-47 in his face, a blizzard of white termite wings; an interrogation under Haile Selassie’s Jubilee Palace; hallucinating of “of cornbread islands” at Chicago’s “Velvet Lounge,” and many “Street Signs, Convolutions, and other California Coincidences” as one poem is titled in this second collection. Warr’s poetry, like his life, is full of interruptions and circularity that captures the broad sweep of the times and microscopic idiosyncrasies of the moment.
