Author: Dr. Maryemma Graham and Tongo Eisen-Martin in conversation

This is a hybrid event. Registration is required for Zoom attendance. In-person attendance does not require registration; seats available first come, first served.

A conversation about the life of poet, writer and professor, Margaret Walker, with Dr. Maryemma Graham, the author of a new biography on Walker, in discussion with Tongo Eisen-Martin.

The House Where My Soul Lives is a comprehensive biography of Margaret Walker (1915-1998), the poet, novelist, professor, mother and mentor whose seminal 1937 poem, “For My People,” garnered her a Yale University Younger Poets Award and whose novel Jubilee is a widely read classic. For this new biography, Dr. Maryemma Graham, who first met Walker in college and continued a relationship with her for two-decades, interviewed scores of people and utilized thousands of primary materials to build a multi-faceted story of the life of this influential author, who taught and mentored young writers at Jackson State University in Mississippi for 30 years. Graham will engage in discussion about her work with San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin.

Graham is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983, she founded the Project on the History of Black Writing, which has been at the University of Kansas since 1999. She has published more than 10 books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998) and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988). She has also written more than 100 essays, book chapters and creative works. Graham has been a John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Ford and Mellon Fellow and has received more than 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also a supporter of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University and has served as a board member.

Eisen-Martin, originally from San Francisco, is a poet, movement worker and educator. His 2012 curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of several books including,  Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award and a PEN Oakland Book Award. The poetry LP  I Go To The Railroad Track And Follow Them To The Station Of My Enemies came out from Rocks In Your Head Records in 2022. He is San Francisco's current Poet Laureate. 

Presented in partnership with the Africana Studies Department at San Francisco State University with assistance from Dr. Tiffany Caesar, former Mellon Scholar at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. For more information contact tiffanycaesar@sfsu.edu.