Poet, Musician Improvise Against Racism + Mass Incarceration

Tongo Eisen-Martin in collaboration with drummer/composer and writer Marshall
Trammell, of the duo Black Spirituals, appear in a first-time improvised duo performance at The Green Arcade. This event is co-sponsored by The Poetry Center at SF State.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, a movement worker and educator who has organized against
mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United
States, has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California
county jails. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-
American Studies at Columbia University. His first full-length book of poems,
Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press), was nominated for a California Book
Award. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-
determination in Jackson, Mississippi. His second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, is
the latest from City Lights Books’ venerable Pocket Poets series.

Marshall R. Trammell is the founder and Chief Investigator of Music Research
Strategies, an interdisciplinary artist performing-ethnomusicology, political
education, and social engagement platform working with video, sound, music, text,
geography, and data collection environments. Trammell’s work combines re-
imaginings of ‘narratives of fugitivity,’ tactical media and solidarity economics of the
Underground Railroad for today’s political landscape. Trammell is the percussionist
in Black Spirituals, an interdisciplinary, electro-acoustic artist collective.