Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 to Celebrate Split This Rock’s 10th Anniversary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, December 7, 2017
CONTACT: Sarah Browning, Executive Director, 202-787-5210, browning@splitthisrock.org
Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 to Celebrate Split This Rock’s 10th Anniversary
Split This Rock will present its sixth biennial national festival of poetry of provocation and witness on April 19-21, 2018 in Washington, DC, celebrating the organization’s 10th anniversary and marking co-founder Sarah Browning’s final festival as Executive Director.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness (April 19-21, 2018) offers three days of readings, workshops, panel and roundtable discussions, a book fair, open mics, youth programming, and activism. The event includes opportunities to speak out for justice, build connection and community, and celebrate the many ways poetry can act as an agent for social change. Split This Rock Poetry Festival is DC’s premiere poetry event and the only festival of its kind in the country, highlighting poets working at the intersection of the imagination and social change.
The festival’s featured poets are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today: Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, and Javier Zamora.
Festival sessions were chosen from proposals submitted in response to a call to the activist poetry community for conversations, workshops, and readings to help participants use poetry to engage in resistance efforts and combat despair, learn from one another across generations, celebrate cultures targeted by hate, and equip us all as creative and effective citizens and activists. Special areas of interest were sessions focused on disability, transgender issues, reproductive rights, xenophobia/immigration, health care issues, confronting white supremacy, poverty and economic inequality, and eco-justice.
Registration rates for the 3-day festival are on a sliding scale from $100 to $300. The student rate is $50. A one-day pass is $85. Scholarships, group rates, and volunteer opportunities are available to defray the cost of attendance.
The festival will take place at venues throughout the Farragut Square neighborhood, with free featured readings in the National Housing Center at 15th and M Streets, NW, and daytime sessions at the Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives and the American Association of University Women. Festival open mics will be held at Busboys and Poets (5th & K).
For registration and more information, call 202-787-5210, email poetryfest@splitthisrock.org or visit http://www.splitthisrock.org/programs/festival-biennial/2018-festival/
Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. The organization calls poets to the center of public life and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. Its programs integrate poetry into public life and support the poets of all ages who write and perform this essential work.
Festival Major Partners include Busboys and Poets, the Institute for Policy Studies, and The Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival is also made possible in part by the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz, Compton, CrossCurrents, Reva & David Logan, Revada, and Rosenthal Family Foundations, the Cynipid Fund, the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and many generous individuals. Festival cosponsors include the Beacon Hotel, the Jimenez-Porter Writers House at the University of Maryland, Poets & Writers, Sinister Wisdom, and the Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives.
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Split This Rock
www.SplitThisRock.org
202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org