Friday Five
As protests against police brutality continue across the Bay Area and the nation, we want to take a moment here to highlight the artists locally who are consistently working toward questioning racist structures and systems in society. Our area is home to many inspiring, prolific Black poets, many of whom also perform them as spoken word.
We are highlighting five of those artists whose poems can be seen and heard online. Give them a listen and buy their books. And add on to our list by telling us in the comments about the Bay Area Black voices that have inspired you.
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1. Tongo Eisen-Martin
Born in San Francisco, Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, poet, and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and the extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has educated in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California’s San Quentin State Prison.
His book, Heaven is All Goodbyes is the winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry; it focuses on and responds to systems of capitalism, state violence, the prison industrial complex, African diaspora, and those marginalized and oppressed in America. Hearing Eisen-Martin recite his poems is as close as one can be to witnessing a revolution on the mic. Hear him perform his poems at the San Francisco Public Library here.
Buy his book on Bookshop or at your local bookstore.
2. Thea Matthews
In her new poem, “Join US,” Thea Matthews writes:
then steal their tanks their tasers their guns
blow up their cars
vandalize the vans
shove the bikes and motorcycles in a box truck
and join us
fight with us
be with us now
not against us
your family calls your name
not your badge number
and to the one with no badge
keep running
to the one with the badge
you guilty of murder
systemic lynching
whether you pulled the trigger
used your weight
or not
you killed
you killed
you killed
black life
Born and raised in San Francisco, Thea Matthews is a Black Indigenous Mexican American poet, scholar, and activist who writes on the complexities of humanity, grief, and resiliency. She earned her BA in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley where she studied and taught June Jordan’s Poetry for the People.
Thea’s debut collection of poems, Unearth [The Flowers] will be out from Red Light Lit this month. You can attend her book launch party on 27th June, 2020 here.
3. James Cagney
Through his work, Oakland-based poet James Cagney interrogates identity, family, loneliness, and the expectations of masculinity. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a program committed to cultivating the artistic growth of Black writers. In an interview with SF Datebook about laying himself bare in his work, he says:
The personal nature of all this stuff — I just kind of gave myself the permission to tell the truth. It is very, very scary. It’s weird, because it’s a poetry collection, but as far as I’m concerned, it also counts as an autobiography in a way.
Hear him read his powerful piece, “I Feel a Scream Coming On,” from his book, Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory (Nomadic Press) here.
Buy his book on Bookshop or at your local bookstore.
4. Dr. Raina J. León
León is a Black, Afro-Boricua, native Philadelphian, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, and has been published in over 50 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the practice of humanizing education.
She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, a journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all of us Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. See more of her work online.
Buy her books on Bookshop or at your local bookstore.
5. tanea lunsford lynx
lunsford lynx is a writer, abolitionist, and fourth-generation Black San Franciscan. In her poem, “Capitol & Broad,” talking about gentrification, she writes:
I’ve watched the library become a blue paint-chipped void on the corner since I could read
I’ve watched the Pentecostal church become condos
And still sing
An excerpt from this poem has been featured by SFMoMA as a permanent exhibit in their parking garage. Listen to her poetry here. She is currently at work on her first novel and we can’t wait to read it.
