Former San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin spits words in a whirlwind, a swirl of language that encircles the listener. Come get caught. Found Poets! is at the Big Easy in Petaluma on First Saturdays.
Found Poets! is about the entertainment of the spirit through performance poetry. From our development program grads to nationally acclaimed headliners, Found Poets! is a challenging, committed poetry community dedicated to hosting a good night out. Hosted by the incomparable Josh Windmiller.
(Headliner)
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and served as the city’s 8th Poet Laureate. He earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
@_tongogara_
(Openers)
Ernesto Garay
Ernesto M. Garay is the author of a poetry collection, Reverberating Voices (Flowersong Press, 2022). Garay was LA Revista Bilingüe: La Voz’s Person of the Month in Sonoma County for March 2020, and a Sonoma County Discovered Award Recipient in Literary Arts. He is Ethnic Studies faculty at Sierra College.
Original Giotis
Giotis is a culture writer, poet, and community facilitator. His wide-ranging interviews and explorations are published on Ghost at The SUB_SCRIBE Newsletter. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, anthologies and the poetry collections Daybreak (FMRL Press, 2019), and Live in Santa Cruz (Inhabit.Books, 2025).
@foundpoets
Audio Angel
in flight, wings crash air, on stage, she lifts, sung prayer—that is audio angel.
@audioangelworld
N’gamè Gray
N’gamè is a native of Sonoma County and the Founder/Executive Director of NuBridges Youth Collaborative. She has a proclivity & love for Poetry, in all its forms.
@sunflower_soul_ngame
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The Big Easy
128 American Alley
- Petaluma