"Tongo Eisen-Martin is today’s leading revolutionary poet. His unflinchingly militant and aesthetically bracing poetry has continued to evolve from his debut, Someone’s Dead Already (2015), through the 2018 American Book Award winner Heaven is All Goodbyes and Blood on the Fog (2021). Eisen-Martin doesn’t just write about activist matters, he’s worked for years to further political education in jails and prisons and throughout the communities of the Bay Area. He taught at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, where he designed the curriculum We Charge Genocide Again!, addressing the historic violence American white supremacy has imposed on Black communities. Last year, he became the eighth poet laureate of his native city, San Francisco, and we spoke about Black liberation, alternative education, and John Coltrane."