Split This Rock Goes to Seattle!

Join Split This Rock at AWP in Seattle

  

February 27-March 1, 2014

Table BB38

2 Conference Presentations

  

Splitistas Katy Richey & Jonathan B. Tucker sporting their 2012 festival T shirts at AWP 2013

We hope to see many friends at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), February 27-March 1, in Seattle.

Split This Rock will be at Table BB38 in the bookfair with haiku post cards to president Obama and a drawing for a free festival registration.

We'll also be presenting two official conference programs: A 2014 festival preview reading with Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Wang Ping on Saturday at noon and an interactive workshop on Thursday at 1:30 pm on "Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word," with Elizabeth Acevedo, Josh Healey, Pages Matam,  and Jonathan Tucker. 

Read on for more details. Poetry is everywhere!

Visit us at Table BB38

Splitistas -- like the two friendly and brilliant ones pictured above -- will be on hand to meet you and tell you more about our efforts to bring poetry to the center of public life - where it belongs! Stop by to write a Haiku Post Card to President Obama and to enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014.

Two Split This Rock Conference Presentations

Intense/Beautiful/Devoted: 

Poems of Provocation & Witness

Saturday, March 1, noon-1:15 pm

Room 301, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3

Sarah Browning, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Wang Ping

Leonard Bernstein wrote, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." Poets today are looking without flinching at our world of drones, evictions, gun shows, and violence to the earth, as they tell the many stories of our lives. Happily, too, they are imagining alternatives and provoking change. A reading of intense and striking music, in the spirit of Split This Rock, with Patricia Smith providing opening remarks.

Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word

Thursday, February 27, 1:30-2:45 pm

Room 604, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

Pages Matam, Jonathan Tucker, Josh Healey, Elizabeth Acevedo

As performance poetry and slam competition grows in popularity, many organizations are using the energetic and entertaining format of slam to engage, inspire, and motivate young students. In this interactive workshop, leading youth workers will discuss the benefits and challenges of slam poetry programs and facilitate dialogue among participants about best practices and how to reach and motivate more students using poetry. 

The full conference program and schedule are here.

The Root's 30 Top Black Performance Poets

To cap off National Poetry Month, The Root recently compiled one badass list of the top Black Performance Poets "who revitalize the art on page and stage." Over here at Split This Rock, we were thrilled to see our beloved Patricia Smith (featured poet at the 2008 and 2010 festivals), and Lenelle Moïse (featured poets at the 2010 festival) make the list.

DC was also finely represented by local favorites and friends: Holly Bass, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Asha Shannon - who just might be the youngest poet on the list at 17, and who recently slammed her way to a spot on the DC Youth Slam Team.

And after experiencing Douglas Kearney on the Poets Rewriting Race Panel at AWP 2011, we have to agree with this pick and The Root's accurate description of Kearney's "unmatchable ability to translate printed stanzas into explosive, endearingly bizarre live shows."

Props to The Root for quite a comprehensive list representing an expanse of styles and voices.

Check out the full list here: http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/top-30-black-perform-formers

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Patricia Smith

VOODOO V: ENEMY BE GONE

The storm left a wound seeping,
a boulevard yawning, some
memories fractured, a
kiss exploded, she left
no stone resting, a bone
army floating, rats sated,
she left the horizon sliced
and ornery, she left in a hurry,
in a huff, in all her glory,
she took with her a kingdom
of sax and dream books,
a hundred scattered chants,
some earth burned in her
name, and she took flight,
all pissed and raucous, like
a world-hipped woman
makin’ room.

- Patricia Smith

From Blood Dazzler, (Coffee House Press, 2008), used by permission.

····
Patricia Smith author, poet, teacher, and performer, is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, a National Book Award Finalist. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, Cave Canem faculty member, and four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history. Patricia wowed audiences at Split This Rock’s inaugural festival in 2008.

····

Smith will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism – four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org. Split This Rock is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Bid on Fabulous Auction Items - and Benefit Split This Rock

Split This Rock's auction items, to be auctioned off at a party at Busboys and Poets Thursday night, have been generating so much excitement that we've decided to open the bidding to email bids. So, even if you live in Maine, or have to work Thursday night, you can still bid.

Here's how it's going to work. Peruse the list of auction items detailed below. Choose what you'd like to bid on and send us an email at info [at] splitthisrock [dot] org. Please include the following information: Name, email address, phone number, which item or items you're bidding on, starting bid, and final bid (that is, the highest you are willing to go.)

We will appoint a proxy for you at the party who will bid on your behalf. We will contact you after the party only if you are the winning bidder. If two people send the same final bid for the same item, we will contact them both before the party to see if either wants to go higher. So please check your email frequently between now and 6 pm on Thursday.

That's it! Send your bids today and help support Split This Rock, your national network of socially engaged poets.

Items up for bid:



Candlelight dinner with Patricia Smith at Eatonville






Candlelight dinner with Cornelius Eady at Eatonville






A week at Wellspring House, a retreat for writers and artists in Western Massachusetts.




A Coaching Session for a Non-Profit Leader with Yael Flusberg of Y Elements







A Large Box of Giandujotti, chocolate-hazelnut confections direct from Turin, Italy