Michael Wolfe (born 3 April 1945) is an American poet, author, and the President and Executive Producer of Unity Productions Foundation. He is 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.
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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 published works of poetry and avant garde prose, including The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, two books of fiction by the Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet, and 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.[1]
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 convert[2] 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),[3] a first-person travel account, and One Thousand Roads to Mecca (1997), an anthology of 10 centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Shortly after 11 September 2001, he edited a collection of essays by American Muslims called Taking Back Islam: American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith.[4] Taking Back Islam won the 2003 annual Wilbur Award for "Best Book of the year on a Religious Theme".[5] In 2010, Blue Press Books published a chapbook of poems by Wolfe entitled Paradise: Reading Notes. He recently completed a fourth volume of poetry, entitled Digging Up Russia: Selected Poems, 1968-2010.
Wolfe is currently working on two novels: one set in contemporary California, entitled Upriver, and one set in Paris during World War II. He has also recently translated and written a brief commentary for a collection of verse from the Greek Anthology, entitled The Last Word: Selected Ancient Greek Epitaphs." This collection will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012, with an Introduction by Richard P. Martin.
For about four years, Wolfe wrote an occasional column for Beliefnet, a Web journal of the world’s religions.[6]
In April 1997, Wolfe hosted a televised account of the Hajj from Mecca for Ted Koppel's "Nightline" on ABC.[7] The program was nominated for Peabody, Emmy, George Polk, and National Press Club Awards. It won the annual Media Award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council.[8] In February 2003, Wolfe worked with CNN International television news reporter Zain Verjee to produce a new half-hour documentary on the Hajj.[9] Wolfe has been featured on hundreds of regional and national radio talk shows.
In 1999, Wolfe helped found an educational media foundation focused on promoting peace through the media, Unity Productions Foundation (UPF). In 2002, UPF produced its first full-length film, called Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet, a two-hour television documentary on the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad. The film, which Wolfe co-created, co-produced, and co-executive edited, received a national broadcast on PBS[10] and subsequent international broadcasts on National Geographic International.[11] It was awarded a Cine Special Jury Award for Best Professional Documentary[12] in its category of People and Places.
Wolfe co-produced two new films released in 2007. The first was entitled Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain. It was aired nationally on PBS on Aug. 22, 2007. Prince Among Slaves was also aired on PBS that year. It is the true story of an African prince enslaved in antebellum Mississippi struggling to regain his freedom.[13]
UPF has since released a trio of contemporary documentaries. On a Wing and A Prayer (2008) and Talking through Walls (2009) both appeared on PBS. The third film, Allah Made Me Funny (2008), was released in theaters. In 2009, UPF's seventh film appeared on PBS. Based on a worldwide Gallup Poll of the Muslim world, it is called Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. All UPF films have websites and are additionally available through UPF's educational outreach project, called 20,000 Dialogues.[14]
Wolfe continues to produce long and short-form documentaries for PBS and other broadcasters in the US and abroad with Unity Productions Foundation.[15] His co-production partner on all these films is Alex Kronemer.[16]