Production Details

Having outgrown the SFIAF office space on Sutter Street, The Last Supper Party concludes its second season with a move to the Mission district as a part of the organization’s flagship Festival program. To celebrate this unlikely feat of success and longevity, series curator, Alameda Poet Laureate Kimi Sugioka, brings together an all-star cast of local artists and wordsmiths to mark the occasion. Included in the still evolving line-up are: Darius Simpson, devorah major, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mimi Tempestt and Ayodele Nzinga. As always, there will be an open microphone to follow the published program.

Audience members are invited to a reception with the artists following the performance.

The Last Supper Party is a spoken word and performance series inspired by Fe Bongolan’s landmark painting of the same name; a 200 sq. ft. canvas exhibited at the Festival's Sutter Street office. The series presents the voices of diverse artists and writers who call out the myriad injustices and impacts of corruption, unchecked power and greed. SFIAF invites audiences to share ideas and bread and find inspiration in the thoughts and words of artists whose perspectives are drawn from a kaleidoscope of cultures. But who are united by compassion and a common desire to seek justice, equity and truth.

Artist Biographies

Tongo Eisen-Martin
San Francisco native, 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 Bookstore Award. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His latest book Blood On The Fog was released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series and named one of the New York Times poetry books of the year. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

devorah major
devorah major served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate. She has seven poetry books, the most recent califia’s daughter, two novels, four chapbooks and a host of short stories, essays, and poems in anthologies and periodicals. In 2022 she received Italy’s Regina Coppola International Literary Award and toured in Sardinia, Northern and Southern Italy. In June 2015 major premiered her poetry play Classic Black: Voices of 19th Century African-Americans in San Francisco at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. devorah major performs her work nationally and internationally with and without musicians.

Ayodele Nzinga
Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, PhD is a multi-disciplined artist, community advocate, arts educator, and cultural architect invested in designing structures that support cultural production. Working at the intersections of community well-being, cultural sovereignty, transformation, and change; Nzinga is a renaissance woman. She is an author, director, producer, thespian, dramaturge, member of Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland. Nzinga is the founding director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc, Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company. Ayodele is also the founding director of the Black Arts Movement Business District, Community Development Corporation of Oakland and producer of BAMBDFEST International.

Darius Simpson
Darius Simpson is a New Afrikan writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry must be used for the positive social, political, and economic development of the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free All Political Prisoners. Free The People. Free The Land.

Mimi Tempestt
Mimi Tempestt is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, "The monumental misrememberings," was published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work in 2020. In 2021, she was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers, and was a Creative Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. Her second book, the delicacy of embracing spirals, is forthcoming with City Lights in 2023. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Kimi Sugioka (Curator)
Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda, a post that includes creating platforms for the presentation of a diverse variety of poets and spoken-word artists. Kimi also performs her own work frequently throughout the Bay Area. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.