Lynda Koolish

Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, was born in 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland, to working class parents. He attended public schools and graduated as a National Merit finalist at the age of sixteen. After two years at the University of Maryland, he entered the world of factory life alongside his father and uncles and remained a factory worker for fifteen years. These years were a literary apprenticeship during which he wrote and published poetry, short fiction, and freelance journalism. During that time he also started 7th Son Press and Blind Alleys, a literary journal.

His first book of poetry, Water Song, was published in 1985 as part of the Callaloo series. He received a NEA fellowship for poetry six months after signing the contract for the collections and left factory life to accept admission into Brown University’s graduate writing program on a full university fellowship, where he completed the M.A. with a focus on theater and playwriting. Concurrently, he completed his B.A. in Literature in English through Excelsior College. In 1998, he was named a Pew fellow.

Weaver has taught in Taiwan at Taiwan National University as a Fulbright Scholar and has traveled in China.  In Beijing in 2005, he received a gold friendship medal from the Chinese Writers' Association.  He began studying Chinese formally in 2002, and from 2004 to 2005 lived in Taiwan where he studied for eight months at the Taipei Language Institute.  At Simmons College where he teaches, Weaver convenes an international festival of contemporary Chinese poetry, with poets attending from Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

His tenth collection of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance/ poems 1985 to 2005 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).  In 2008 he won a Pushcart prize for his poem "American Income," which was published by Poetry magazine in 2007 and is included in The Plum Flower Dance.