Split This Rock to Rock AWP 2013!

Heading to AWP in Boston March 7-9? Spend time with poet-activists of Split This Rock!

Visit us in the Bookfair at Table B2, March 7-9. In addition to hanging out with us and other socially engaged poets, you can:    

Board Chair Dan Vera, and Youth Programs Coordinator Jonathan Tucker horsing around at AWP 2012

• Write a haiku post card to President Obama
• Enter to win a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014
• Join Regie Cabico & Brittany Fonte, the editors of Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, for a book signing on Thursday, March 7, 1:30-2:45 pm. 
• Join co-founder Melissa Tuckey, winner of the ABZ Books Award for Tenuous Chapel, for a book signing on Thursday March 7 and Friday March 8, 4:30-5:30 pm. With wine!

Split This Rock @ AWP! Off-Site Event Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here    Thursday, March 7, 2013  6-8 pm   Readings from the new anthology, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, in conjunction with an exhibit of artists' books responding to the 2007 bombing of Baghdad's "Street of the Booksellers."  With Kazim Ali, Alise Alousi, Amaranth Borsuk, Sarah Browning, Contributing Editor Persis Karim, Philip Metres, and Terese Svoboda Reception to follow Free and open to the public  Cambridge Arts Council Gallery  City Hall Annex 344 Broadway Cambridge, MA  Central Square T stop on the red line Co-sponsored by Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Project, Cambridge Arts Council, Center for Arabic Culture, PM Press and Split This Rock

Split This Rock AWP Reception     Friday March 8, 2013  7-8:15 pm Hynes Convention Center, Room 207   Join us for drinks, mingling, and a short program featuring Martín Espada, Lenelle Moïse, and Saeed Jones reading his Split This Rock 2013 Poetry Contest Winning Poem! Free drink for the first 50 to arrive!    Sarah Browning, Patricia Smith, and Melissa Tuckey at AWP 2009

Melissa Tuckey Book Launch: Tenuous Chapel

Melissa Tuckey Launches Award-Winning 

First Book

Tenuous Chapel  

    

Sunday March 24, 2013

   5-7 pm

NOTE LOCATION: Busboys and Poets (14th & V)

2021 14th Street NW

Washington, DC 20009

Join Melissa Tuckey, co-founder of Split This Rock, for a book launch and reading from her award-winning book of poems, Tenuous Chapel. With special guests, Sarah Browning, E. Ethelbert Miller and Joseph Ross.

Tenuous Chapel was chosen by Charles Simic for the prestigious ABZ first book award. In his forward, Simic writes, "If the hope of any poem is to render the experience in a fresh unsettling way, she has that gift." The book moves from the intimate and personal to the communal and political. It's a search for the sacred in a time of war and environmental destruction.

Join us as we toast Melissa and celebrate this exciting book of poems!  

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR TENUOUS CHAPEL:

"Melissa Tuckey's voice and vision are entirely her own. These precise and surprising poems reinvent a kind of Imagism with fresh eyes and a profound sense of real-world compassion, a poetry hard-earned and patiently well made."   Sam Hamill

“The poems in Melissa Tuckey’s Tenuous Chapel are stark yet radiant, ecstatic yet somber, metaphysical yet grounded in the intimate, the communal, and the political.  She confronts the bewildering complexity of a violent world with candor and clarity, with wit and grace, with tenderness and wisdom. It is hard not to be held by the spell of these enigmatic and uncanny poems that delight and surprise at the turn of each line."  Eric Pankey

"The poems in this impressive first book are evocative, elusive, spare, with heady feats of juxtaposition: Melissa Tuckey has pared their engaging narrative and descriptive elements down to emotional essences that invite the reader’s involvement. Highlighting both family matters and larger political and social issues, the poems often reference disappearance, and many are set in winter; but the builder of this Tenuous Chapel is ultimately able to 'make green an offering' and 'believe in progress at a time when / everything is going backward.' " Martha Collins

March Sunday Kind of Love: Jericho Brown & Remica Bingham

March Sunday Kind of Love 

Featuring: 

Jericho Brown & Remica Bingham

 Sunday March 17, 2013

   5-7 pm

Busboys & Poets (14th & V)
                                                          2021 14th Street, NW  

                                       Washington D.C. 20009

Hosted by: 

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey 

$5 online or at the door 

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets
& Split This Rock

Jericho Brown was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and once worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans.  The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

Remica L. Bingham earned an MFA from Bennington College and is a Cave Canem fellow. Her first book, Conversion, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in February 2013. Currently, she is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. For more information on her work and upcoming events, please visit: www.remicalbingham.com.