Tongo Eisen-Martin

Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco on May 20, 1980. He received a BA and MA in African American studies from Columbia University.

Eisen-Martin is the author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights Publishers, 2021), which the New York Times’ listed among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017), which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award; and Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015).

A poet, movement worker, and educator, Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the United States. In 2021, Eisen-Martin was appointed the eighth poet laureate of San Francisco. In 2024, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.