Love Letter to Oakland
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Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, organizer, and educator whose work centers around human rights, mass incarceration, and racial justice in America. He is committed to facilitating resistance and liberation through art. Born in San Francisco, he is the city’s eighth Poet Laureate. Eisen-Martin is the author of someone's dead already (2015), Heaven Is All Goodbyes (2017), Waiting Behind Tornados for Food (2020), and Blood on the Fog (2021). Heaven Is All Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, a PEN Oakland Award, and was NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year in 2018. Blood on the Fog received the 2021 Golden Poppy Award for Poetry and was named Best Poetry Book of 2021 by the New York Times. His poetry has been published in Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Eisen-Martin received his MA from Columbia University where he has taught as a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He has also taught at detention centers around the US. His 2012 curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, ‘We Charge Genocide Again!’ has been utilized as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press for revolutionary books by writers of color. In 2022, Eisen-Martin and other activists occupied Parker Elementary School in East Oakland for a four month sit-in against school closures in majority BIPOC districts.
PBS News Hour ‘Brief But Spectacular’: Tongo Eisen-Martin | ‘We Charge Genocide, Again!’ Curriculum