Kundiman announces Poetry Prize

Kundiman, Inc. is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Kundiman Poetry Prize in partnership with Alice James Books.

The prize is open to emerging and established Asian American poets. The award of $2,000, publication of the winning manuscript, and sponsorship of a reading make this a highly desirable prize.

Submissions are accepted from November 15, 2009 to January 15, 2010. Guidelines for submission are available here.

Alice James Books is a cooperative poetry press with a mission is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process.

Kundiman was founded in 2002 to provide opportunities for Asian American poets to perfect their skills through education and performance and to promote Asian American literature as a vital part of American letters. Its programs include a summer poetry retreat, held annually since 2004 and a reading series in New York City.

Kundiman’s partnership with Alice James Books for The Kundiman Poetry Prize is made possible through the support of Fordham University.

Interview with Tara Betts

Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue, a Cave Canem fellow, and a graduate of the New England College MFA Program. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam, coached youth who went on to Brave New Voices, and appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam". She currently teaches at Rutgers University and leads community-based workshops. She will be reading tomorrow at Sunday Kind of Love

How did you come up with the title? What does Arc & Hue mean?

The title, Arc & Hue, is culled from a poem in the first section about a little boy and I drawing on the sidewalks outside my mother’s house in Kankakee, IL. I kept thinking of how, as adults, we try to construct these moments so that children have, and hopefully later, recall having positive experiences with us. I know that’s where the poem came from, but when the collection came together the last line of the poem embodied all that longing and potential nostalgia that is easily wiped away. This book grapples with that feeling of holding on to memories we create and letting them go to make room for the rest of our lives. Some people have also hinted that Arc & Hue are two words that describe a woman of color. I appreciate, this, but it was not intentional in writing this book or the poem.

Abdul Ali is a poet and writer living in the District of Columbia. A native New Yorker, his work spans the malleable spheres of personal and public and pays particular attention to cityscapes, and the urban experience. He’s the proud papi of a five year-old daughter. He is the new Split This Rock Program Associate. You can read the rest of this interview at his blog, Words Matter

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Fady Joudah

Anonymous Song

When the shooting began
Everyone ran to the trucks
Grabbed whatever their backs needed
And made for the trucks
Except K

And they begged him to get on
The ones who ran to the trucks
But he refused them all

Later they found him
On the road running
And howling and still
He refused them all
Since he knew
His legend would grow

Then sightings began
He was clothed or naked
Cooking or sleeping
Eating or drinking what
The others gave him

And their begging remained the same
The trucks going loaded
Then coming back empty the same
Until it was forgotten
When K had first lost his mind

Before the shooting started
Or much worse after

One thing for sure
K is real
Safe and sweet especially
Holding a baby to sleep
Or asking for a sip of your Fanta
Or calling out your name from where

You cannot see him

- Fady Joudah

Excerpt from The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah, Yale University Press, 2008. Used by permission.

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If you are in the DC-area, please join us on Thursday November 19th, as Joudah's work will be the topic of a discussion led by translator and poet Yvette Neisser Moreno - the first in a series of book discussions brought to you by Split This Rock and The Writer's Center.

7 pm
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD
(5 blocks south of Bethesda Metro)
301-654-8664
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Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her foreword as, “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession ... have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” He is the winner of the 2008 Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish collected in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Copper Canyon Press in the US. The US edition was short-listed for PEN America’s poetry in translation award in 2009. His most recent translation is of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005.
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Joudah will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation and 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.

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
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Sunday Kind of Love: Tara Betts and Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Sunday Kind of Love
Third Sundays of the Month,
4 pm Busboys & Poets
14th & V Streets, NW, Washington, DC

Hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah Browning
Cosponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock
Open Mic at each event! – Admission free, donations encouraged
For more info: BusboysandPoets.com
info@splitthisrock.org
SplitThisRock.org, 202-387-POET

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 4-6 pm
Tara Betts and Luis Alberto Ambroggio with Translator Yvette Neisser Moreno

For more information, click here

The Art of Extraction: Beehive Collective and Mark Nowak, Nov. 18th

Split This Rock, the Social Action & Leadership School for Activists, and Foreign Policy in Focus are proud to announce Bees Swarm and Nowak Speaks: The Art of Extraction.

Come to this creative audio-visual mix that will both move and enlighten you. The progressively spectacular art of the renowned Beehive Collective is coming to DC to join forces with the powerful social justice poetry of Mark Nowak. The theme of this blend of sight and sound display will address the true cost of coal and how regular people are challenging its impact.

In a rare evening you won't want to miss, "The Hive" and Mark will captivate you with their artistic genius reflecting a passion for social justice.

Because space is limited please pre-register here. A suggested donation of $5 would be appreciated for the travel and lodging expenses of the Beehive Collective but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

November 18th, 2009, 6:30 - 9:00pm

1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington DC

The Beehive Collective is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for its stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for its dedication to the revitalization of the old Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in their small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing since 2000, at full speed! Their most recent campaign is exposing the cost industry's strip mining injustices in the Appalachia.

Mark Nowak, Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, will read from his recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary. A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America's most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, WV miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation's curriculum for schoolchildren, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh. Check out his blog here.

Kathi Wolfe in the LA Times: An Editorial on Hate Crimes Legislation

The following is an excerpt from Kathi Wolfe's editorial on President Obama's recent signing into law of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Read the full article here.

In 1999, Eric Krochmaluk, a man with intellectual disabilities from Middletown, N.J., was kidnapped, choked, burned with cigarettes and abandoned in a forest.

Some people worry that the recently signed hate crimes law will inhibit free speech by making it possible to prosecute an individual on the basis of his or her beliefs or speech. Yet, the legislation has provisions that ensure that prosecution would be based only on violent acts based on bias.

Disabled or gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people don't want to hinder freedom of speech. We just don't want to become the victims of hate crimes.

No one will be prosecuted simply for exercising the freedom of speech. And that is how it should be, even if that speech is ugly and bigoted.

But once someone commits a violent crime against us because of who we are, that person's bigoted intentions ought to be penalized. Judges and juries, at sentencing, often take into consideration the frame of mind of the criminal. They should do so with these crimes, too. The community has a right to say that bigoted violence is especially corrosive.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act won't end bias-based crimes. But it will put everyone on notice that such crimes will not be tolerated.

And for those of us who are vulnerable, it makes us a little less fearful today than we were yesterday.

That's something that all Americans should celebrate.


Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine.

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Natalie Illum

IV. Wheel Spinning

for LAVA

The first time I saw these activists turned
acrobats, I was immobilized as they arched
through hoops, twisting like DNA.
These bodies in strength formations
invoking geology. They carry

something sacred and fragile, bypassing
fear. I hitchhiked, feverish as we journey
without a roadmap to the core.

I could feel motion as though
it were my own, a brief symbiosis.

And even though I shouldn’t, I go back
to rubber necking the crash site
of my own body, mesmerized
by how it flew.

You said that accomplishment is just that,
a simple stretch that grows in your own mind
to mean more. It’s a two minute airplane ride,
three bodies regrouping, prone
on a leather bar floor because we believe
in each other, because

we are all crippled by the world we walk in.
The way experience aligns us into living poems:

land masses of tears, beaches made beautiful
in our mind’s eye. Tonight, it’s just
one fear conquered,
one wound buried,
the ligaments of us
extended and holding. And that is everything.

- Natalie Illum

Excerpt from “After Brand New Highway” from On Writer’s Block and Acrobats (2006), used by permission.

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Natalie Illum is an activist, writer and federal employee. Natalie is a founding board member of mothertongue and promotes queer and marginalized writers, musicians, and artists through 3Word Productions. She also facilitates poetry and activism workshops in a variety of community venues. Natalie is in the process of adapting her unpublished memoir, Spastic, to the stage with the help of renowned performance poet and director Regie Cabico. She is currently ranked 25th at the Women of the Worlds Poetry Slam.

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Illum 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.

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
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210