Black Tradition in Present Time

This event seeks to join a multi-generational group of poets who have dedicated their lives to craft and struggle The poets: David Henderson, QR Hand and Tongo Eisen-Martin will share their work and insights on poetry and cultural resistance. The event seeks to promote the idea of an artist’s unified output of movement practice and creative expression as vehicle for individual and collective liberation; and also the realities of renaissance being a matter of artists taking structural responsibility for art. Art and self-determination progress inextricably always together.

DAVID HENDERSON  was connected to the Black Arts Movement through the Umbra Workshop where he served as an editor of their magazine, and editor of the three Umbra Anthologies. De Mayor of Harlem and Neo-California are his best known books of poetry. He has read a selection of his poetry for the permanent archives of the Library of Congress. Author of the lyrics to Sun Ra’s composition “Love in Outerspace,” he has also recorded  with saxophonists and composers Ornette Coleman and David Murray, and the cornetist and composer, Butch Morris. The author of the widely acclaimed biography ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky. Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, recent publications includes prose and poetry in the anthologies: Beats at Naropa; Cross Worlds:Transcultural Poetics; Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry, and the poetry eBook, Obama, Obama. He has taught in the SEEK Program and was a Poet-in-Residence at The City College of New York. And was a visiting professor at The University of California, Berkeley, and The University of California. San Diego, The State University of New York, Stony brook and Wesleyan University.

Q. R. HAND JR.  moved to the SF Bay Area from NYC about forty years ago. Originally published in the 1968 classic, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) and Larry Neal, which has recently been reproduced by Black Classics Press, he is the author of three poetry books, i speak to the poet in man (jukebox press), how sweet it is (Zeitgeist Press) and whose really blues, new & selected poems (Taurean Horn Press). He is a member of the wordwind chorus, a Bay Area quartet that has performed poetry with jazz for over twenty years.  wordwind chorus has a cd, we are of the saying, recorded in 2000, with original members, Reginald Lockett, Brian Auerbach, Lewis Jordan, and Q. R. Hand Jr.

He has recently been anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, edited by Alan Kaufman (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), An Eye For An Eye Makes the Whole World Blind, Poets on 9/11, edited by Allen Cohen and Clive Matson (Regent Press, 2002) and New American Underground Poetry, Volume 1: The Babarians of San Francisco – Poets from Hell, edited by David Lerner, Julia Vinograd and Alan Allen (The Press of San Francisco, 2005).

TONGO EISEN-MARTIN – Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. 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 of poems titled “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book titled “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series.

Thursday, March 15 at San Francisco State University