Split This Rock
Encyclopedia
Split This Rock, a national nonprofit organization of poets, artists, and activists based in Washington, D.C.
The organization's stated goals are: To celebrate the poetry
of provocation and witness being written, published, and performed in the United States today; and to call poets to a greater role in public life and to equip them with the tools they need to be effective advocates in their communities and in the nation.
In pursuit of these goals, the organization held its first poetry festival in March 2008 in Washington, D.C., which featured four days of poetry readings, workshops, walking tours, and a march to The White House. More than 300 people participated in the full festival, with some 2,000 people visiting one or more of the festival readings or other events.
Featured poets included: Chris August
, Jimmy Santiago Baca
, Coleman Barks
, Dennis Brutus
, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri
, Mark Doty
, Martín Espada
, Brian Gilmore, Carolyn Forché
, Galway Kinnell
, Stephen Kuusisto
, Semezdin Mehmedinović
, E. Ethelbert Miller
, Naomi Shihab Nye
, Alix Olson
, Alicia Ostriker
, Ishle Yi Park, Joel Dias Porter, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy
, Pamela Uschuk
, and Belle Waring. Lucille Clifton
and Sharon Olds
were on the original list of featured poets but could not attend.
Split This Rock's second poetry festival was March 10–13, 2010, in Washington, DC's U Street neighborhood
. Featured poets for the 2010 festival were: Chris Abani
, Lillian Allen
, Sinan Antoon
, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty
, Martha Collins
, Cornelius Eady
, Martín Espada
, Andrea Gibson
, Allison Hedge Coke
, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah
, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann
, Jeffrey McDaniel
, Lenelle Moïse
, Nancy Morejón
, Mark Nowak
, Wang Ping
, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze
, and Quincy Troupe
. Bruce Weigl
was on the list of featured poets but was unable to attend.
The third festival is scheduled for March 2012.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
The organization's stated goals are: To celebrate the poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
of provocation and witness being written, published, and performed in the United States today; and to call poets to a greater role in public life and to equip them with the tools they need to be effective advocates in their communities and in the nation.
In pursuit of these goals, the organization held its first poetry festival in March 2008 in Washington, D.C., which featured four days of poetry readings, workshops, walking tours, and a march to The White House. More than 300 people participated in the full festival, with some 2,000 people visiting one or more of the festival readings or other events.
Featured poets included: Chris August
Chris August
Chris August Megert is an American Contemporary Christian musician who performs under the stage name Chris August. He began recording as a secular musician before switching to Christian music. His song "Starry Night" which reached #1 on the Billboard Christian Songs chart in 2010/2011...
, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Jimmy Santiago Baca of Apache and Chicano descent is an American poet and writer.- Life and career :...
, Coleman Barks
Coleman Barks
Coleman Barks is an American poet. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is nonetheless renowned as an interpreter of Rumi and other mystic poets of Persia.- Biographical notes:...
, Dennis Brutus
Dennis Brutus
Dennis Vincent Brutus was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have apartheid South Africa banned from the Olympic Games.-Life and work:...
, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri is an award-winning American poet and playwright. She has published 15 volumes of poetry and more than 20 plays and continues to actively write and publish. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband, sculptor Kenneth Flynn...
, Mark Doty
Mark Doty
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist.-Biography:He was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.In 1989, his partner Wally Roberts tested...
, Martín Espada
Martín Espada
Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.- Life and career :Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York...
, Brian Gilmore, Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate.-Life:Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 28, 1950, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a B.A...
, Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell is an American poet. He was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 1989 to 1993. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world. His best-loved and most anthologized poems are "St...
, Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto is an American poet.-Early life:Stephen Kuusisto was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in March 1955 where he spent most of his childhood. His father worked as a professor of government at the University of New Hampshire and wanted to study the Cold War, so he moved his family to...
, Semezdin Mehmedinović
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Semezdin Mehmedinović is a Bosnian writer, filmmaker, and magazine editor.After studying Librarianship and Comparative Literature in Sarajevo, he worked as an editor of "Lica" and "Valter" magazines, which served as a voice of opposition to the ruling Communist regime...
, E. Ethelbert Miller
E. Ethelbert Miller
Eugene Ethelbert Miller, best known as E. Ethelbert Miller is an African American poet and teacher.-Life:...
, Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and American mother. Although she regards herself as a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home.-Career:...
, Alix Olson
Alix Olson
Alix Olson is an American poet who works exclusively in spoken word. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997 and uses her work to address issues of capitalism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, misogyny, and patriarchy...
, Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...
, Ishle Yi Park, Joel Dias Porter, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy
Susan Tichy
-Life:She graduated from Goddard College and the University of Colorado.She has taught at George Mason University since 1988.She was Executive Producer of Poetry Theater: An Evening of Visual Poetics....
, Pamela Uschuk
Pamela Uschuk
Pamela Uschuk is an American poet, and Visiting Poet at University of Tennessee. She won a 2010 American Book Award, for Crazy Love: New Poems.She studied at Interlochen Arts Academy....
, and Belle Waring. Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton was an American writer and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979–1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland...
and Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds
-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...
were on the original list of featured poets but could not attend.
Split This Rock's second poetry festival was March 10–13, 2010, in Washington, DC's U Street neighborhood
U Street Corridor
The U Street Corridor is a commercial and residential neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C with many shops, restaurants, nightclubs, art galleries, and music venues along a nine-block stretch of U Street. It extends from 9th Street on the east to 18th Street and Florida Avenue on the west...
. Featured poets for the 2010 festival were: Chris Abani
Chris Abani
Christopher Abani is a Nigerian author. Abani's first novel, Masters of the Board, was about a Neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria...
, Lillian Allen
Lillian Allen
Lillian Allen is a Canadian dub poet, reggae musician, writer and Juno award winner.-Biography:Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1951, she left that country in 1969, first moving to New York City, where she studied English at the City University of New York...
, Sinan Antoon
Sinan Antoon
Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi poet and novelist, he also featured in the film About Baghdad and Voices in Wartime.Antoon was born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and American mother. After emigrating to the United States after the Gulf war, he studied English literature at Baghdad University, and...
, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Red Sugar , and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois...
, Martha Collins
Martha Collins (poet)
-Life:She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A., and the University of Iowa with a Ph.D.She taught at University of Massachusetts Boston; she was the Pauline Delaney Chair in Creative Writing at Oberlin College.She is editor of Field magazine...
, Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady is an American poet focusing largely on matters of race and society, particularly the trials of the African-American race in the United States. His poetry often centers around jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class...
, Martín Espada
Martín Espada
Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.- Life and career :Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York...
, Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson born April 22, 1975 is an award-winning poet and activist. She currently lives in Colorado. Her poetry focuses on gender norms, politics, and today's struggles facing non-heterosexual people. Gibson disclosed that she chose to write what was in her bones and thus these subject...
, Allison Hedge Coke
Allison Hedge Coke
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American Book Award-winning American/Canadian poet of mixed Wendat/Huron/Metis/Tsalagi/ Creek/French Canadian/Portuguese/Irish/Scot/English ancestry.-Background:...
, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and physician. He is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic.-Life:...
, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann
Richard McCann
Richard McCann is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a long-time professor in the A gay writer, he is the author of , a collection of linked stories that novelist Michael Cunningham has described as unbearably beautiful. It won the 2005 from...
, Jeffrey McDaniel
Jeffrey McDaniel
Jeffrey McDaniel is an American poet. He has published four books of poetry, most recently 'The Endarkenment' . He is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts...
, Lenelle Moïse
Lenelle Moise
Lenelle Moise is a poet, actress and playwright born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Currently based in the United States, she performs at colleges throughout the country, presenting work about race, gender, class, immigration and sexuality. Her spoken word CD Madivinez won the 2007 Patchwork Majority...
, Nancy Morejón
Nancy Morejón
Nancy Morejón is one of Cuba's major authors and poets. She has gained recognition for work whose themes are centered on women and the Afro-Cuban experience.-Life history:...
, Mark Nowak
Mark Nowak
Mark Nowak is an award-winning American poet from Buffalo, New York. Nowak is currently the director of the graduate creative writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.-Works:*Revenants, Coffee House Press, 2000, ISBN 9781566891073...
, Wang Ping
Wang Ping
Wang Ping , style name Zijun , was a Cao Wei officer who later defected to Liu Bei, and served as a general under Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history.-Service under Cao Cao:...
, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American poet.-Background:Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry...
, and Quincy Troupe
Quincy Troupe
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr., , is a poet, editor, journalist-Early life:The son of Negro League baseball catcher Quincy Trouppe , Troupe Jr. attended Grambling State University on a baseball scholarship...
. Bruce Weigl
Bruce Weigl
Bruce Weigl is an American contemporary poet who teaches at Lorain County Community College. Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star...
was on the list of featured poets but was unable to attend.
The third festival is scheduled for March 2012.