The Burbank Public Library Buena Vista Branch hosted an afternoon with Guggenheim Fellow Robin D.G. Kelley and SF Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin on Sunday, April 7.
“National poetry month kicks off in style with a special conversation between Robin D.G. Kelley and Tongo Eisen-Martin. These accomplished writers are set to read excerpts from their acclaimed works and delve into topics ranging from art and liberatory struggle to their personal writing journeys. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions and get your books signed too,” the library said in a statement.
Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. He writes on a broad range of topics, including the history of social movements, music, visual culture, race and radical thought.
Kelley’s books include the prizewinning “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original”; “Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times”; “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression”; “Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class”; “Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America,” which was selected one of the top 10 books of the year by the Village Voice; and “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.”
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of “Blood on the Fog,” “Heaven Is All Goodbyes,” which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award, and “Someone’s Dead Already.”
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 country.
First published in the April 6 print issue of the Burbank Leader.
