Michael Warr

​

San Francisco poet Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), The Armageddon of Funk, and We Are All The Black Boy from Tia Chucha Press. He is a multi-year San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grantee and a recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award. Other awards include San Francisco Library Laureate, Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory, 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 other honors. He 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 updated online at Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (bit.ly/4sxpS7X). Since 2018, he has been adding names to his poem chronicling the unjust killings of Black people by the police. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and a Friends of the San Francisco Public Library board member. Follow his creative work at Michael Warr-Tumbler,

                                       Chun Yu 俞淳, Ph.D.

​

Chun Yu 俞淳, Ph.D., is an award-winning bilingual poet, graphic novelist, artist, scientist, and translator. She is the author of the memoir in verse Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and the forthcoming graphic biography Ink & Blood: Poetry and Power in the Lives of Emperor Li Yu and Chairman Mao (Macmillan, 2027). Yu's poetry and translations have appeared in Poetry, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Arion Press, Heyday Books, and more.  Yu is currently translating a collection of Audre Lorde’s poetry (East China Normal University Press, 2027) and translating and co-editing a bilingual anthology featuring renowned poets from Chinese and African American communities. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships in the U.S. and worldwide. She was honored as a San Francisco Public Library Laureate (2023) and named to the YBCA 100 list (2020). Yu is the co-founder of Two Languages/One Community, fostering dialogue between communities, and Chinese American Stories, presenting Chinese immigration history. She holds degrees from Peking University (B.S., M.S.) and Rutgers University (Ph.D.), and was a postdoctoral fellow in a Harvard–MIT joint program. Learn more at www.chunyu.org and connect @chunyu.org_chun.