Revolutionary Poetry Workshop
Online
Instructor: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Schedule: Tues /Thurs | 6:00-7:30 PM PST
Jan 20 – Feb 19, 2026
Tuition: $450
Revolutionary Poetry Workshop
In times of injustice and unrest, it is the work of the poet to incite change. To make revolutionary art is to take responsibility for reality.
Every craft has a tether of social orientation. We do well to tie the development of our craft to the liberation of all people. In so doing, we relax into the potential of art to be an absolutely humanizing process, in which we gain a more nuanced insight into reality as we digest it. And as poets with true insight, we can use revolutionary praxis to transform reality. To make revolutionary art involves birthing great works on the page.
This 6-week workshop will focus on social analysis and its critical relationship to poetic craft. We will use as guides: poems by revolutionary artists, short texts on historical analysis, and the poems we write along the way. Join us and write poems that matter, rooted in social justice and informed by critical praxis, social and historical truth.
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Tongo Eisen-Martin was the 8th poet laureate of San Francisco. He authored Someone’s Dead Already, nominated for a California Book Award, and Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which won multiple awards, including the 2018 American Book Award and California Book Award. His 2020 book Blood on the Fog was named the Best Poetry Book of 2021 by the New York Times. He also recently won Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize. Besides being a poet, he is an educator and organizer focusing on mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers and Columbia University and co-founded Black Freighter Press.