Michael Zapruder is an award-winning composer, songwriter and recording artist, and a co-founder of San Francisco's Howells Transmitter arts collective and record label. His albums include 52 Songs (1999), This is a Beautiful Town (2003), New Ways of Letting Go (2006, Howells Transmitter), Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope (2009, SideCho Records), and Pink Thunder (2012, Black Ocean Books, The Kora Records), a collection of free verse pop art-songs made from the poems of more than twenty contemporary American poets. He was awarded the 2013 Glasow Fellowship for music composition at California State University East Bay, where he is doing graduate work. He lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two sons.

Praise

Zapruder lets the songs wander, as if he's creating a melodic new method of storytelling... He builds songs in a Jon Brian-esque style, with Elliot Smith-like sensitivity and raw ache in his vocals, treading ever-so-lightly over tracks of electric guitar, drums, synthesizers, and in some cases, marimba or brass horns. 

—San Francisco Bay Guardian

Zapruder may well have taken the largest step any artist, literary or otherwise, has taken in years toward reminding us why we love poetry . . . Pink Thunderis that remarkable historical happening that's both a great album and a great poetry collection.

—The Huffington Post

If Pink Thunder has a message, it’s that the relationship between poetry and music is more elusive, more conditional, than that of traditional lyrics in a song. This is the best thing about the project, the way Zapruder uses his music to mirror, or echo, his own reading of the material, and its emotional effect.

—L.A. Times