Tongo Eisen-Martin

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the current poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, published as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poet series, and someone’s dead already. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and is the founder of Black Freighter Press. His most recent collection, Blood on the Fog, further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of the Black experience.  On December 15, 2021, he came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with journalist and music critic Jeff Chang.