Split This Rock: Sessions

Showing posts with label Sessions. Show all posts

Monday, April 2, 2018

#SplitThisRock2018 Sessions: Gender

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2018 invites poets, writers, activists, and dreamers to Washington, DC for three days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation. The festival features readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, parties, activism—opportunities to speak out for justice, build connection and community, and celebrate the many ways poetry can act as an agent for social change.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule with session descriptions is available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on the themes of gender.

No F*cks to Give: Women Poets and Dark Humor (Reading)
Presenters: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Kendra DeColo, Erika Meitner, Shara McCallum,
Tyler Mills
Friday, April 20, 11 am - 12:30 pm
American Association of University Women Room 1

No More Masks! 45 Years of Women in Poetry (Panel)
Presenters: Elizabeth Acevedo, Ellen Bass, Sarah Browning, Solmaz Sharif
Thursday, April 19, 3:30 - 5 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 102

Poetics in the Wake of Sexual, Gendered, and Inherited Violence (Panel)
Presenters: Marina Blitshteyn, Cathy Linh Che, Lynn Melnick, Tanya Paperny,
Chet'la Sebree
Friday, April 20, 1:30-3 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Memorial Hall

Carved from the Rock: WOC Poets on Expanding Sanctuary (Reading)
Presenters: Mahogany Browne, Yesenia Montilla, Cynthia Oka, Seema Reza
Saturday, April 21, 1:30-3 pm
National Housing Center Room D

Enlarging Poetics: Writing the Fat Body (Reading)
Presenters: Aaron Apps, Jessica Rae Bergamino, Diamond Forde, Jennifer Jackson Berry, Sade LaNay (fka Murphy), Kara van de Graaf, Rachel Wiley
Saturday, April 21, 11 am-12:30 pm
Charles Sumner School, Room 102

Holding Space Beyond the Page: Black Women Writers on Solidarity (Panel)
Presenters: Destiny Birdsong, April Gibson, Kateema Lee, Maya Marshall
Saturday, April 21, 11 am-12:30 pm
National Housing Center Room D

When I Enter: Black Queer Femme Sex, Resistance, and Survival (Reading)
Presenters: M. Saida Agostini, Xandria Phillips, Casey Lynne Rocheteau, Alison C. Rollins
Saturday, April 21, 11 am-12:30 pm
National Housing Center Room B

Writing from Where We Are: Race, Queerness, and Bearing Witness (Workshop)
Presenters: Kali Boehle-Silva and Bianca Vazquez
Saturday, April 21, 1:30-3 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room G-3

#SplitThisRock2018 Sessions: Disability & Neurodiversity

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes related to disability and neurodiversity.

Wordplay: Poetry & Self-Advocacy for Youth with Autism (Workshop)
Presenter: Donnie Welch
Thursday, April 19, 1:30- 3 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Conference Room

The Deaf Poets Society Reading (Reading)
Presenters: The Deaf Poets Society Editor Natalie Illum and readers Jay Besemer, Camisha Jones, Jill Khoury, Sari Krosinsky, Maria R. Palacios, Divya Persaud, and Naomi Thiers
Thursday, April 19, 3:30-5 pm
National Housing Center Room C

Hacking Norms & the Contested BodyMind (Panel)
Presenters: Kay Ulanday Barrett, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Jim Ferris, Molly McCully Brown, Susannah Nevison, Jillian Weise
Friday, April 20, 1:30-3 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Conference Room

Sick/Disabled Realities: Striving Poetics of Ache, Interdependence & Survival (Panel)
Presenters: Kay Ulanday Barrett, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Tyler Vile
Friday, April 20, 3:30-5 pm
American Association of University Women Room 1

"Against Death What Other Stay Than Love": Disabled Poets Read (Reading)
Presenters: Sandra Beasley, Meg Day, Constance Merritt, Khadijah Queen, Jillian Weise
Saturday, April 21, 9-10:30 am
National Housing Center Room C

#SplitThisRock2018 Sessions: International Perspectives

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on the themes of international issues and connections.

Crossing Borders Before and After Now (Panel)
Presenters: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Sonia Guiñansaca, Barbara Jane Reyes,
Javier Zamora
Thursday, April 19, 11 am - 12:30 pm
American Association of University Women Room 1

Quitting History! Poets Penning Liberation (Reading)

Presenters: Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, Shauna M. Morgan, Enzo Silon Surin

Thursday, April 19, 11 am - 12:30 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 102

Arabic/English Poetry Game Workshop (Workshop)
Presenters: Zein El-Amine, Yael Flusberg, Johnna Schmidt
Thursday, April 19, 1:30 - 3 pm
American Association of University Women Room 2

Poetics of the Veteran Art Movement: Warrior Writers/Combat Paper (Panel)
Presenters: Kevin Basl, Lovella Calica, Anthony Torres

Thursday, April 19, 1:30 - 3 pm
National Housing Center Room B

Translators as Activists, Curators, and Cultural Interpreters (Panel)
Presenters: Francisco Aragón, Ilya Kaminsky, Aviya Kushner, Olga Livshin,
Katherine Young
Thursday, April 19, 3:30 pm - 5 pm
National Housing Center Room B

Riding Through Despair (Panel)
Presenters: Anna Deeny Morales, Leeya Mehta, Vivek Narayanan, John Rosenwald,
Marc Vincenz
Friday, April 20, 11 am - 12:30 pm
National Housing Center Room C

Dreaming America: Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Prison (Panel)
Presenter: Seth Michelson
Friday, April 20, 1:30 - 3 pm
National Housing Center Room C

Sheyr Jangi: Lineages of Survival (Reading)
Presenters: Majda Gama, Rami Karim, Aurora Masum-Javed, Sahar Muradi, Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, Zohra Saed, Purvi Shah

Friday, April 20, 3:30 - 5 pm
National Housing Center Room B

Reciting Poetry in Minefields: Co-translating Young Iraqi Poets (Reading)
Presenters: Abbas Kadhim and David Allen Sullivan
Saturday, April 21, 11 am - 12:30 pm
National Housing Center Room A

Poets at the Borderlands of Change: Celebrating Gloria Anzaldúa (Reading)
Presenters: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Tara Betts, Sarah A. Chavez, Olga García Echeverría, Miguel M. Morales, Dan Vera
Saturday, April 21, 1:30 - 3 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 102

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Trauma, Violence, and Healing

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes of trauma, violence, and healing at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.

For the full festival program, please visit the program page here.And hey: Pre-registration is open now until March 31.

Restorative Poetics

Photo by Kristin Adair.

Samiya Bashir
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Humanity on trial in digital space. Inexhaustible violence of -ism and image. We’ll consider the power of poem-making to metabolize aggression out of our bodies, to reclaim and restore humanity, and more. We’ll explore an alchemical poem-making toward transmutation of experience, insight, and approach--collaboratively and individually--toward resolution of swarming aggressions into light, into recognition, into direction, into sustenance. We’ll come with all we carry. We’ll leave with new poems, new maps, new seeds.

In This Skin: A Writing and Performance Workshop
Aimee Suzara
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

"Every organ has a consciousness," wrote Akira Kesai. And Sekou Sundiata said, so aptly, "it all depends on the skin we're livin' in." The body is our nexus of joy and pleasure, as well as the nexus for historical trauma, erasure, and exploitation. This writing and performance workshop will allow participants to explore how to begin writing from the body, while addressing attitudes about the body, including perceptions and expressions of beauty, race, gender, sexuality, and ability/disability. Participants will explore and develop gesture and text through guided writing, theater, and movement exercises and create a short piece. Given recent events in which the destruction of Black bodies has been most visible, and the historical trauma experienced by many people of color, those of colonized histories, and women, the workshop has special timeliness and relevance. It is a part of an effort to remember, heal, and transform individually and collectively.

Trauma Narrative: Writing As A Way of Healing
Liz Alexander
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 C [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

This workshop will examine how writing, as a medium, can be used as a coping strategy and self soothing technique for persons who have experienced psychological and emotional trauma.

In this context, trauma is a term used to describe experiences or situations that are emotionally painful and distressing, overwhelming one’s ability to cope, invoking feelings of powerlessness, and impeding the normal functioning of one’s life. Through the use of exercises, the workshop explores how writing can serve as an outlet of expression, as a meditative practice, can be a space of safety and validation, and is a tool for processing and reinterpreting traumatic experiences. I also highlight several different modalities of writing, i.e music, spoken word, journalism, and memoir. The trauma narrative, or the “act of telling a story,” is an effective therapeutic technique for survivors of trauma and this interactive workshop serves as an overview of that process.

Won’t You Come Celebrate: A Meditation on Violence(s) in Poetry
Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods
Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum [Map]

Saturday, April 16 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Photo by Kristin Adair

Borrowing its name from the iconic Lucille Clifton poem, this panel will bring together poets to discuss how they deal with the portrayal and exploration of violence in their work. Urban violence, sexual violence, genocide, and other forms of traumatic conflict will be explored as source material and inspiration for poetry. The poets will present how these conflicts figure into their work and influence both content and form. As artists, educators, and young poets of color, the members of the Dark Noise Collective will engage with questions of ownership, resistance, healing, and the white gaze.

Monday, March 28, 2016

#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Class & Labor

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes of class and labor at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.

For the full festival program, please visit the program page here.

And hey: Pre-registration is open now until March 31.

Migration and Identity: Interrogating Privilege Through Poetry
Benjamin Brezner, Marcos Martinez, Sean Pears, Susan Tichy
AFL-CIO Gompers Room [Map]

Thursday, April 14 2:00pm – 3:30pm

How do privileges stemming from race, ethnicity, class, gender, and migration intersect in our lives? Writers and activists of all backgrounds need to understand how overlapping regimes of privilege work, in order to dismantle them. Panelists will address how they write about privilege as they explore the relationships between migration and identity. Through hands-on writing activities, participants will have the opportunity to interrogate the sources of our uneven social structures and to write about their own experience. In this session, we hope to take one small step towards building a community in which we feel comfortable working together and exploring these topics through our poetry. Writers will leave with additional resources to spark the creation of new poems.

And The Earth Did Not Devour Us: A Farmworker Reading Sarah A. Chavez, Miguel Morales, Neftali Cuello Villalobos

Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 300 [Map]

Friday, April 15 11:30am – 1:00pm

The 2016 election is already steeped in issues of immigration and the working class. Immigrant stories from privileged politicians will flood the media with manipulated images of workers and uncontextualized data. This information is incapable of communicating the nuance in the material lives of farmworkers who are so often used to polarize public policy. For that we’ll need literature and art. This reading features diverse, award-winning writers in various stages of their careers who have themselves labored as farmworkers. Despite differences in age (early 20s to late 40s), education (PhDs to high school drop-outs), and geography (West coast, Midwest, South), they share a drive to revisit and honor aspects of the farmworker experience that often go unrecognized: the connection between culture and farm labor, the disabling of the body, the intersection of gender and sexuality in labor and labor movements. They will read from their own work and share and discuss the farmworker literature that influenced their writing.

Off The Page, On Your Feet: Moving To Labor Poetry
Elise Bryant, Rocky Delaplaine
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 300 [Map]

Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Activism and activists thrive in a community of kindred spirits. It takes courage to speak truth to power. Like laughter, courage is contagious and can be cultivated, nurtured, passed along. In this workshop we will pick a few potent poems about work, and back up the words with the power of our breath, volume and timbre of voice, gesture, expression, and shared movement. When we stand, move, and speak truths using the medium of poetry, we embody courage and become its transmitter.

DC Worker Poets Occupy the Mic
Mark Nowak & Worker Poets of DC
Beacon Hotel [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00pm

Worker Writers, an Institute founded by Mark Nowak in collaboration with the PEN American Center, organizes and facilitates poetry workshops with global trade unions, workers’ centers, and other progressive labor organizations. These workshops create a space for participants to re-imagine their working lives, nurture new literary voices directly from the global working class, and produce new tactics and imagine new futures for working class social change. Building on our work in NYC with workers centers such as Domestic Workers United, the Taxi Workers Alliance, Street Vendor Project, and Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, these workshops will engage Washington, DC, workers in writing new poems and sharing them together in a public group reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival. For updates from the workshop, follow us at @WorkerWriters.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Youth!

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions for, led by, or about youth poets and their education at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.

Youth Open Mic

Hosted by Dominique Christina and Denice Frohman - Open to all poets 20 and under

Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 102 [Map]

Saturday 2:00-3:30pm

Young poets and emcees (20 and under) are invited to share their poetry in a lively and supportive atmosphere. The youth open mic will feature teens of the DC Youth Slam Team which took first place at 2014 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, as well as other young poets who sign up to perform. Each artist can perform one piece, 3 minutes or less.

POETRY + PASSION = PURPOSE (A Writing Workshop on Community & Personal Visioning)

Richard Love

Foundry United Methodist Church Davenport Center

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am [Map]

Poetry + Passion = Purpose is a Teens With a Purpose writing workshop in which participants mindfully manifest what they desire to see happen in their community, their neighborhood, and their lives, through creative expression. Poetry and music are fused throughout the experience. Participants will create a group piece that conveys a shared group value capable of reaching a broad audience, including, perhaps, people who do not share their values.

On the Move: Engaging New Poets - Four Milwaukee Social Justice Poetry Projects

Portia Cobb, Freesia McKee, Margaret Rozga, Angela Trudell Vasquez

Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Four Milwaukee social justice poet-activists create projects that move, literally and metaphorically. They will engage the audience in discussing and practicing strategies for generating poetry in prisons, community-based workshops, even a bus road trip, and for keeping poetry experiences alive through print, performance, and video projects. Milwaukee’s Freedom Summer 50 project involved students in a semester-long multi-arts study of voter registration struggles and culminated in a bus trip to Mississippi’s Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary conference. Students wrote and read poems in open mics on the bus. At the ACLU of Wisconsin’s annual Youth Social Justice Forum, students learn the importance of free speech and telling their stories. Students hear poets present socially-conscious poetry, write their own pieces, and have the option to perform in this supportive environment. To address Milwaukee’s mass incarceration problem, a community-university partnership heeds Jimmy Santiago Baca’s advice: “If they won’t let our young brothers out, YOU GO IN.” Poets do readings with Prose & Cons in Racine, offer workshops at a men’s work-release prison, and collect books for a women’s prison. UW-Milwaukee’s cream city review’s fall 2015 issue is incarceration themed.

Language of the Unheard: Rural Children of Color and Literature

Alex "PoeticSoul" Johnson, Patrice Melnick, Rosalyn Spencer, Latasha Weatherspoon

Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]

Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

In rural America, there are close to four million children of color: full of power, promise, possibility, and potential. Unfortunately, because they are in rural communities, they do not receive the media attention afforded to children of color in more urban areas, and they are often under-prioritized by charitable or benevolent organizations. Educators Patrice Melnick and Rosalyn Spencer will join poets-cum-spoken-word-artists Latasha Weatherspoon and Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson to explore the art of working with marginalized youth groups. Through active discussion, they will lead the roundtable in finding ways that literary artists can engage with youth, such as: Mentorship, volunteering at youth facilities, and organizing and actualizing artists’ presentations in schools, detention centers, and other facilities. Presenters and participants will consider the ways that literary artists act as youth activists, and how they can maximize their efficiency with methods like community grant programs and collaboration with other activists and community and religious organizations. Together, we –as poets, spoken word performers, and literary artists– will help our communities’ children thrive, succeed, and take the artistic and cultural future that is rightfully theirs.

Write Now: A Teen-Led Poetry Writing Workshop

Members of the DC Youth Slam Team

Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00pm

Teen poets on Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team lead this writing workshop open to all. Interactive, participatory, and discussion-based, this workshop will include games, analysis of poems, writing prompts, time for sharing, and free pens.

Looking at the Page: Page Considerations for Spoken Word Poets

Regie Cabico, Elizabeth Acevedo and DC Youth Slam Team alumni Kenya Newsome, Nesha Ruther, and Hannah Smallwood

Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

This workshop will provide spoken word poets and performance poets with tools they can use when revising work in the hopes of publication. Some questions we will be considering: How do spoken word poets prepare their work for viewing on the page? What special considerations should performance poets make when editing work for publication in literary journals, chapbooks, or online? Poet and head coach of Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team Elizabeth Acevedo and festival featured poet Regie Cabico guide this workshop with help from former students: Hannah Smallwood, Nesha Ruther, and Kenya Newsome.

Friday, March 25, 2016

Free Events Throughout #SplitThisRock2016

From the Poet Laureate’s reading the night before the festival opens, to open mics, to a public action bringing poetry to the streets, Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016 offers lots of event for free to the public! We believe that poetry and justice should be available to all, so please join us for these free events.

Special Library of Congress Kick-Off Event with Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 7pm

Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building of Library of Congress, Ground Floor, 101 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC 20540.FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

21st Poet Laureate Consultant Juan Felipe Herrera will celebrate the conclusion of his term of his laureateship. Book sales and signing will follow. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Hispanic Division.

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Featured Poet Readings

All readings below are FREE and open to the public. Poets will be available to sign books after each reading and Upshur Street Books will be on site with books for sale. All of these readings will be ASL Interpreted.

Thursday, April 14, 2016 | 7:30-9 pm

Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Craig Santos Perez, and 2015 Split This Rock Poetry Contest Winner Sara Brickman

Friday, April 15, 2016 | 7:30-9 pm

Jennifer Bartlett, Jan Beatty, Regie Cabico, and 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Contest Winner Lauren K. Alleyne

Saturday, April 16, 2016 | 4:30-6 pm

Dominique Christina, Martha Collins, Dawn Lundy Martin

Saturday, April 16, 2016 | 8-9:30 pm

Reginald Dwayne Betts, Nikky Finney, Ocean Vuong

Sunday, April 17, 2016 | 11:30am-1 pm

Amal Al-Jubouri, Rigoberto González, Linda Hogan

LOCATION OF READINGS

National Geographic, Grosvenor Auditorium

1145 17th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036

Entrance on M Street

SPLIT THIS ROCK POETRY FESTIVAL 2016 - SPECIAL EVENTS

OPEN MICS

Thursday, April 14 | 10-11:30 pm

Busboys and Poets, 14th & V, Langston Room
2021 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20009

Free to festival registrants, $5 for all others. Sign up list to perform at the door.

Friday, April 15 | 10pm – 12 am

Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Street, Cullen Room
1025 5th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001

Free to festival registrants, $5 for all others. Sign up list to perform at the door.

PUBLIC ACTION
Friday, April 15 | 10 – 11am

Join us in countering hate and fear, by committing Public Displays of Poetry! For one hour Friday morning, we’ll flash mob downtown DC with poems of love and welcome. Visit the website for details: www.splitthisrock.org. Gather at Human Rights Campaign, the festival hub, at 9:45 am. Further details TBD and will be posted to website.

SOCIAL JUSTICE BOOK FAIR
Saturday, April 16 | 10 am-3:30 pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives, Room 300 | 1201 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036

Free to attend.

Hosted in collaboration with the Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives, the Social Change Book Fair will feature over 30 socially engaged organizations, progressive presses, literary magazines, and independent newspapers. More info here.

CHARLES SUMNER SCHOOL MUSEUM & ARCHIVES OPEN HOUSE

Saturday, April 16 | see below for times

Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives, Room 102 | 1201 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036

The following daytime sessions are free to attend on Saturday, April 16:

Contemporary South African Spoken Word. A reading featuring poets from Tshwane, South Africa | 9:30am _ 11am

#BlackPoetsSpeakOut: Split This Rock – Reading and Open Mic. Poetry inspired by the Black Lives Matter against police violence | 11:30am – 1:00pm

Youth Open Mic. Hosted by Dominique Christina & Denice Frohman of Sister Outsider – Open to poets ages 20 and under | 2:00pm – 3:30pm