Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015)

Born in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has educated in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California’s San Quentin State Prison. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He was also adjunct faculty at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. Subscribing to the Freirian model of education, he designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.

The UC Santa Cruz Creative Writing Program Presents
The Lives of Other Songs
Living Writers Series Spring 2017

Thursdays / 5:20-6:50pm / Humanities Lecture Hall

April 13, 2017: Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015)

May 4, 2017: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, author of A Home in Tibet (Penguin, 2014) and Eric Sneathen, author of Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016)

May 11, 2017: Aisha Sasha John, author of THOU (BookThug, 2014)

May 18, 2017: Rosa Alcalá, author of Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010)

June 1, 2017: Lauren Levin, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016)

June 8, 2017: UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading