The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a special event with San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, in conversation with award-winning poets Su Hwang and Michael Kleber-Diggs.

[This is an in-person and online event. Register here for zoom participation]

Tongo Eisen-Martin has been named San Francisco’s eighth Poet Laureate in the city’s history. He will be in Saint Paul to read from his works and join in conversation with Su Hwang and Michael Kleber-Diggs as they discuss the role of the artist activist in our world and the making of culture. We are proud to bring together these three renowned poet activists doing work against mass incarceration. The 2020 uprisings opened up the conversation of defunding the police and our ongoing conversation about the carceral state.

San Francisco’s 8th Poet Laureate, Tongo Eisen-Martin, is an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration and extrajudicial killings of Black people. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year; and Blood On The Fog (City Lights, 2021) is the 2021 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Poetry – Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance.

Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions), which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, she is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with poet Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

Copies of Tongo Eisen-Martin’s work will be for sale from our friends at SubText Books!

This event is free and open to the public, in-person or via the virtual link registration above. (In keeping with both library practice, the wishes of our featured guests and in hopes to keep everyone safe against the several illnesses prevalent as we are in the midst of holidays and gatherings, we ask that any guest at the in-person event wear masks.)