Michael Wolfe

Michael B. Wolfe (born April 3, 1945)[1] is an American poet, author, and the President and Co-Executive Producer of Unity Productions Foundation.

A secular American born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a Christian mother and a Jewish father, Wolfe converted to Islam at 40 [2] and has been a frequent lecturer on Islamic issues at universities across the United States including Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, SUNY Buffalo, and Princeton.

For fifteen years, Wolfe was sole publisher of Tombouctou Books, a small press enterprise located in Bolinas, California, that issued small editions of poetry and avant garde prose, including The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, two books of fiction by the Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet; American fiction by Douglas Woolf, Dale Herd, Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Steve Emerson, and Paul Bowles's final collection of short stories, Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories.

;[3] The Japan and India Journals by Joanne Kyger; and volumes of poetry by Tom Clark, Lewis MacAdams, Leslie Scalapino, and Duncan McNaughton.

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, he studied poetry with Richard Wilbur, 1964–68, and was in a writing circle with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop.

[6] Taking Back Islam won the 2003 annual Wilbur Award for "Best Book of the year on a Religious Theme".

In 2010, Blue Press Books published a chapbook of poems by Wolfe entitled Paradise: Reading Notes.

In 2017, he began researching and writing a nonfiction book, "My Mother's People," about his colonial Yankee ancestry and modern American immigration.

[9] In April 1997, Wolfe hosted a televised account of the Hajj, broadcast from Mecca for Ted Koppel's Nightline on ABC.

[11] In February 2003, Wolfe worked with CNN International television news reporter Zain Verjee to produce a new half-hour documentary on the Hajj.

[17] Wolfe continues to produce long and short-form documentaries for PBS and other broadcasters in the US and abroad with Unity Productions Foundation.