You've made 2010 a huge year for Split This Rock. With the consistent support of our local and national community, Split This Rock has spread the word far and wide that poetry makes a difference in the world, takes a stand, challenges and provokes.
You can help us charge into 2011 with a gift today. Just click here to donate.
Among Split This Rock's many accomplishments in 2010:
- A second transformative Split This Rock Poetry Festival featuring over 45 events over four days, sparking essential conversations, and presenting dazzling, critically important contemporary poetry. Registrations were up 40% and attendees were a stunningly diverse crowd of all ages. The festival was given prominent coverage in the Washington Post and on NPR's national show, "Face the Nation." See photos here.
- Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week reached thousands, including teachers who are using them in classrooms and MFA students who are circulating them to classmates - busting open the poetry mainstream. If you've missed some, you can browse the archive here.
- Poets took it to the streets at rallies for immigration reform and at the huge One Nation Working Together march, wearing poetry signs and distributing poems to marchers.
- We celebrated DC's young poets with the third annual contest, The World & Me, honoring the young winners at Busboys and Poets in March. The national adult contest also attracted a great round of entries; read judge Chris Abani's top choices here.
- Split This Rock's monthly series at Busboys and Poets, Sunday Kind of Love, presented a fifth bold year of poetry, featuring Kathy Engel, John Murillo, Aracelis Girmay, Brenda Hillman, Steven Cordova, and many others. And we celebrated an exhibit of Allen Ginsberg's photos at the National Gallery in July with three sold-out performances of "Howl" by Anne Waldman.
2011 is shaping up to be another critical year, as we plan the next Split This Rock Poetry Festival, scheduled for March 22-25, 2012, and featuring - so far - Marilyn Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, and Alice Walker. 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of visionary poet and activist June Jordan, so we'll be celebrating her legacy throughout the festival.
Split This Rock will also be Literary Partners at the national AWP conference this year; watch your In box for details of our tribute to Langston Hughes with Sonia Sanchez and a Split This Rock panel on the poet as public citizen. With off-site readings on immigration and the Gulf oil disaster and an action on the White House, it will be an exciting week!
None of this will be possible without your support. Please donate $100, $50, $25 or whatever you can afford today. Just click here to give.
Or write a check to "Split This Rock" and mail it to:
Split This Rock
1112 16th Street, NW
Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
Let us remember June Jordan's words as we navigate these difficult times: "We will have to drown out the official language of the powerful with our own mighty and conflicting voices or we will perish as a people."
Help Split This Rock amplify the mighty and conflicting voices we all need so much today. Please click here and give.
With gratitude and fierce hopes for peace in 2011,
Sarah Browning
for the whole Split This Rock team
Split This Rock Poetry Festival
202-787-5210
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