Rae Armantrout & Tongo Eisen-Martin
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego. She has taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco State University. Armantrout’s latest book is Partly: 2001–2015, an anthology spanning some of her most salient works and containing never-before published poems. Her 2009 collection, Versed, received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout earned her MA at San Francisco State University in 1975. She lives in San Diego, CA.
Tongo Eisen-Martin
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 United States. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. 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 is also a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His latest book of poems titled, Someone’s Dead Already, was nominated for a California Book Award. His next book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, is being published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series.