Transformations: The Cold War of Poetry & Protest

Join us for a special literary arts event with acclaimed poets Kathleen Ossip and Michael Warr, as they discuss how poetry and literature have helped transform and define our culture and the social justice movements from the Cold War to the present day. Kathleen Ossip will share excerpts from her book, The Cold War, and Michael Warr will present his anthology, Of Poetry & Protest (from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin). The discussion will be moderated by Mark Lipman.

About the Poets

Kathleen Ossip’s most recent book, July, will be published June 1, 2021. She is also the author of The Do-Over, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2011; and The Search Engine, selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The Believer, Poetry, Paris Review, and many others. She teaches at The New School in New York. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and she has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

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 (Tia Chucha Press). His honors include 2020 Berkeley Poetry Festival: Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Library Laureate, Creative Work Fund Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poetry is translated into Chinese by poet Chun Yu for their “Two Languages / One Community” project. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. He covered war and revolution for the BBC, Economist, and Guardian as a correspondent in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.