Poetry Center

As part of the 2026 Undiscipling the Fields series, It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome MAZZA Writer-In-Residence Tyehimba Jess for a poetry reading and conversation in the Poetry Center. Join us on Tuesday April 7, 2026 from  5pm to 7pm in the Poetry Center, HUM 512. 

Tyehimba Jess has written two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, he is a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018.

On Wednesday, April 8, 6:00pm to 8:00pm, in a collaboration with the Poetry Center and the Undisciplining the Fields series at the San Francisco State University Department of Creative Writing; Small Press Traffic; and Black [Space] Residency @ Minnesota Street Project present a special engagement with Tyehimba Jess, recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Tongo Eisen-Martin, the 2021-2024 San Francisco Poet Laureate. Please join us for a necessary and restorative evening of poetry by poets whose works are vibrantly alive to the world as is and who invite us to imagine possible worlds that might could be–necessary worlds of otherwise and other ways. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Books by both authors will be sold on a sliding scale.

6-6:30pm - Reception

6:30-8pm - Readings and Q&A