Join NYC ABF and writers Sasha Banks and Tongo Eisen-Martin for a reading of their work followed by discussion.

Banks’ recent book america, MINE is “a radical conjuring of a post-white supremacist United States of America […] blending speculative poetics and historiography, Banks creates a rich revisionist account of America, in which its most fraught institutions collapse and Uhmareka emerges—layering a new, strange, and graphic landscape with the textures of supernatural happenings, ghosts, creatures, and inconsistent recollections of American histories.”

Eisen-Martin’s Heaven is All Goodbyes is “truly revolutionary poetry. A vortex of images, observations, inspired leaps and free associations spills forth from a choir living in oppression and transience. Moments of political and spiritual convergence, surrealism and blunt materiality, gangsterism and its husk, revolution and perseverance.”

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

Sasha Banks is a 2019 Rhode Island Writers Colony fellow who received her MFA at Pratt Institute. Her work has been published in PBS NEWSHOUR, APOGEE, RHINO, POOR CLAUDIA, ZÓCALO PUBLIC SQUARE, and FANZINE. She is the author of, america, MINE.