Michael Wolfe

Michael B. Wolfe (born April 3, 1945) 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 and has been a frequent lecturer on Islamic issues at universities across the United States including Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, SUNY Buffalo, and Princeton. He holds a degree in Classics from Wesleyan University.

Wolfe taught writing and English at Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover academies, the California State Summer School for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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

Wolfe was a participant at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1960 as a 16-year-old. 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. He returned to Bread Loaf for a second summer in 1966. Wolfe was a MacDowell Colony resident in poetry in 1968. He received an Amy Lowell Traveling Poets Scholarship in 1970, which was renewed for two further years. During this time he traveled and wrote in North and West Africa. His first books of poetry How Love Gets Around and World Your Own, a book of fiction Invisible Weapons, and a travel journal In Morocco derive from this period. In the 1980s, he returned to North Africa several more times. As a Muslim he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1990 and wrote extensively about it.

Wolfe's first works on Islam were a pair of books from Grove Press on the pilgrimage to Mecca: The Hadj (1993; 2015), a first-person travel account, and One Thousand Roads to Mecca (1997; updated & expanded, 2015), an anthology of 10 centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, he edited a collection of essays by American Muslims and others called Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith. Taking Back Islam won the 2003 annual Wilbur Award for "Best Book of the year on a Religious Theme". In 2010, Wolfe was included in "The 500 Most Influential Muslims," (Third Edition).

In 2010, Blue Press Books published a chapbook of poems by Wolfe entitled Paradise: Reading Notes. In 2012, Blue Press published a second chapbook, entitled "Greek to Me." In 2014, Blue Press issued a third chapbook, "Tarantella." In 2014, he also assembled a fourth, longer volume of poetry, entitled Digging Up Russia: Selected Poems, 1968-2010. Between 2008 and 2012, Wolfe translated a collection of 127 epitaphs from the Greek Anthology, entitled Cut These Words into My Stone: Selected Ancient Greek Epitaphs. This collection with a set of brief contextualizing essays was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013, with an Introduction by Professor Richard P. Martin, Chair of the Stanford University Classics Department. The book was well received in classical journals and among poets. It was short-listed for PEN's Best Book of Poetry in Translation.

In 2014 Wolfe completed a brief, first-person novel, entitled "The Motorbike," set in Cincinnati in 1958. In 2017, he began researching and writing a nonfiction book, "My Mother's People," about his colonial Yankee ancestry and modern American immigration.

For about four years, Wolfe wrote an occasional column for Beliefnet, a Web journal of the world's religions.