Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Michael Silverblatt: The Quintessential, Omnivorous Reader and Compassionate Interviewer

February 15, 2026

The LA Times has posted an obituary for Michael Silverblatt, the legendary interviewer of authors on the Santa Monica-based radio station KCRW. The article stated that Michael died yesterday, at age 73.

Born in Brooklyn, and educated at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he arrived in Los Angeles around 1977. I first met him when he was living in Santa Monica in an apartment just north of Wilshire Blvd., and about halfway between Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore and the Palisades Park. Michael frequented that store and its reading series throughout the summer and fall of 1978, during which time I was running the reading series and putting together an anthology of Los Angeles poets entitled THE STREETS INSIDE. I held a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the book’s publication at my apartment in Ocean Park and invited Michael to it, at which point he had his first extended conversation with Jim Krusoe. Michael began visiting Jim’s apartment, which was barely more than a hundred yards from my place, on a regular basis, and quickly found himself to be a rising star in a literary firmament that was by that time attracting the attention of a younger generation of poets such as Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler, who were gravitating to Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice.

Michael, however, was forced to recognize eventually that his most passionate identity — that of an extraordinarily close reader of novels and poems — was the way that he would best be able to make a memorable contribution to the Republic of Literature. “Bookworm” was his destiny, and only his friends from those early years truly comprehended the arduous journey he undertook to bring it about. No tenured professor ever endured an equivalent regimen of graduate students and unpaid adjunct work as daunting as that which Michael submitted himself to. The admiration writers felt for him was earned at an enormous price, but the secret triumph was how Michael always shifted that admiration elsewhere by implicitly urging listeners to attend to larger cultural issues. If he made a penetralia out of overlooked details in a writer’s work, he did so not to show off his remarkable acuity as a reader, but to encourage others to dig even deeper into themselves to discover how a book might restore a semblance of legitimate order to the disorder of contemporary life.

If the end is in one’s beginning, it is perhaps appropriate that the last time I saw him was at Beyond Baroque, speaking with great fondness for his memories of those early years, as he addressed a gathering in honor of the late poet and novelist Kate Braverman that had been organized by novelist Janet Fitch.

R.I.P., Michael. I still remember you at the party on Hill Street, New Year’s Eve, looking like someone for whom the new year meant that you had finally begun to find your niche.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-15/michael-silverblatt-dead-kcrw-bookworm-host-73?sfmc_id=6532a4c325b3640666c6aaca&utm_id=44142765&skey_id=37c43a5c3a11da12bdc55f9c622d0baf0ec7493490d9327a7099d22dd53e6a5e&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ALERT-Email-List-Michael%20Silverblatt%2C%20%27genius%27%20host%20of%20KCRW%20literary%20show%20%27Bookworm%2C%27%20dies%20at%2073-20260215&utm_term=Alert%20-%20News%20and%20Entertainment

I would then recommend you turn to KCRW’s special show on Michael’s tenure as their resident professional reader.

https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/remebering-kcrws-bookworm-michael-silverblatt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookworm_(radio_show)

UPDATE: A week after his death, The NY Times has also posted an obituary. Given that New York City is the home base for the mainstream commercial book industry, and that Michael’s astute advocacy of novelists and poets also immensely benefitted their publishers, it is only fitting that Michael receive the honor of an obituary in the New York Times. As testified to by my account of his arrival in Los Angeles, Sam Roberts got the date wrong by which time Michael first settled in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, I thank him for mentioning other details that have been left out of other obituaries, such as his disenchantment with both academic life at Johns Hopkins as well as the haughty choke-chain of editorial exclusiveness in the New York publishing scene. If Los Angeles is a haven for those for whom self-invention is a necessity, then L.A. indeed redeemed its literary soul by giving Michael a chance to lift all of our spirits, whether the reader was in Duluth, Minnesota; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; or Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(Updated February 21, 2026)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/books/michael-silverblatt-dead.html