Writers on Writing: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Eisen-Martin is a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His first full-length book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press), was nominated for a California Book Award. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of black people throughout the U.S. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He has been a faculty member at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies and designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. In October he served as Mazza Writer in Residence at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum, “We Charge Genocide Again,” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country.
Writers on Writing
The Creative Writing Department opens its Writers on Writing course to the public this spring. Taught by Dodie Bellamy, the course features faculty and visiting writers reading from their works and discussing their creative process.
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Photo by Shalom Bower