Split This Rock was founded in fellowship halls and in the streets, and we continue giving attention and solidarity to the streets, to Black organizers in DC and beyond, to the families and communities who are grieving Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and every Black life taken by a long history of state-sanctioned violence, to lawyers and medics, and those who are sheltering protestors and bailing people out of jail, from Minneapolis, Louisville, Tallahassee, Columbus, Jackson, Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Houston, in major cities and small towns in every state, and to you, wherever you are.
At Split This Rock, we remember that this whole nation is made from stolen Indigenous land and with stolen Black labor. We pay attention to the recent looting of Covid-19 emergency funds -- a looting that represents one of the greatest transfers of wealth in US history and is set to deepen racial inequality for generations. This is the history of looting we remember.
We know that many communities are joining in struggle now. We want to remember that the white supremacist violence visited on so many of our communities goes back to before the founding of this settler colonial nation and that this nation has been anti-Black and anti-Indigenous from before its beginning. We must remember these root causes to really understand the origins of violence against so many of our communities: the escalation of verbal and physical violence visited on Asian American communities during the spread of COVID-19, the cruel disregard for the lives of disabled and chronically ill people during a global pandemic, the genocidal violence against Latinx communities, the continued surveillance and policing of people racialized as Muslim under the Patriot act and the War on Terror, the continued criminalization of all non-white immigrants, legislative and physical violence against women (cis, trans, and nonbinary), the criminal disregard for the ecosystems that sustain us all, and on and on across the frontlines of resistance being held by so many reading these words.
We must remember anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous violence as root causes in order to protect and nurture each other's liberation. Fannie Lou Hamer, who founded the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi when she was excluded from the Democratic party apparatus there, taught us that Nobody is free until Everybody is free.
Our liberation depends on each other.
We invite you to join us to:
Support Black-led Organizations in Washington, DC & beyond
Instead of donating to Split This Rock right now, please give your attention and donations to these Black-led organizations working in literature and community organizing:
What does it mean to defund police and fund care for people?
Learn more about reform, defunding, and abolition on Critical Resistance's website. Critical Resistance is a national, member-based organization, founded in 1997, that has been led by Black scholars and activists including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others.
What We're doing at Split This Rock
We remain committed to actions aimed at undoing oppression. A few of those actions include:
Centering Black voices & reflections on state-sanctioned violence in Split This Rock programs
Reducing social media activity that does not address calls for change, and instead using those channels to amplify the work of Black-led organizing and communities
Continuing our work to cultivate a culture at Split This Rock that confronts & eliminates white supremacist practices, both internally and externally
Continuing to fund programs that feature Black poets and teaching artists and other people of color and that centers their work on all themes
Thank you for the ways you stay connected with and fight for each other's liberation. May we renew our commitment to defend All Black Lives -- including Black women's lives, Black trans lives, and Black disabled lives. May we commit to these lineages of struggle, to each other, and to the land that bears our weight.
Split This Rock is delighted to announce travel scholarship awards to Carmin Wong, leilani portillo, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and torrin a. greathouse. These scholarships, offered for the first time this year in honor of founding director Sarah Browning and with the generous support of her family, support travel and lodging for poets to attend Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2020.
Thank you to everyone who applied! The twenty-two applications we received affirm how needed this funding is. Since January 2019, we've increased scholarship opportunities across all programs--from youth slams to the poetry contest to the Festival. Split This Rock's staff and board are committed to growing the Sarah Browning Travel Scholarship fund as part of this work.
Split This Rock looks forward to welcoming the recipients and all attendees to Split This Rock Poetry Festival (March 26-28, 2020)! For more information about the Sarah Browning Travel Scholarship, please visit Split This Rock's website.
I’ve been so moved and impressed by Split This Rock’s growth and power under Rasha Abdulhadi’s leadership since I passed them the baton almost a year ago. Some of these changes are behind-the-scenes, strengthening systems to ensure Split This Rock’s longevity as a home for activist poets, as a wellspring of hope in these perilous times. I couldn’t be prouder!
When I led Split This Rock, I had many dreams for the work that I could not accomplish, due to financial or time constraints. One was to provide travel funds for low-income poet-activists to attend Split This Rock Poetry Festival. The organization could give out all the scholarships folks requested, but if they didn’t have the funds to travel to DC and stay in our increasingly expensive national capital, they couldn’t attend. It broke my heart when several people scheduled to present at the 2018 fest had to cancel for exactly this reason.
So, I decided to do something about it. I’m excited to join the staff and board of Split This Rock in announcing the Sarah Browning Travel Scholarship Fund. With leadership support from my family, including an incredibly generous contribution by my uncle Charles Browning, we’ve raised $7,000 so far. My goal by the end of the calendar year is $10,000.
Please don’t give to the Travel Fund what you usually give to Split This Rock at year end. The group needs those gifts to support all its regular, kick-ass programming, including the festival itself! But if you are inspired to give more, I’d be honored if you earmarked your additional dollars to the Travel Fund. Imagine the difference it will make! (Also, I’m told by development experts that not many funds are named for women, so I’m tickled that our fund can make a tiny blow to the patriarchy!)
This year has been one of decompression for me, after 16 years of intense organizing (DC Poets Against the War began in 2003). I’m very happily ensconced in Philadelphia now, pursuing an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction at Rutgers Camden, full time! I miss my huge, raucous DC family, but get down to visit frequently. Wherever you are, wave to me by email at sarahbrowningwriter@yahoo.com or on Facebook or Instagram.
I send love and joy and determination to the gorgeous Split This Rock family everywhere. You inspire me daily.
Sarah
Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works 2007). She is a co-founder of Split This Rock and served as its Executive Director from its inception until January 2019. An Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, Sarah is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Adirondack Center for Writing, and the Creative Communities Initiative. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and Poetry magazine. From 2006 until January 2019, Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love Reading & Open Mic poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been an organizer in public housing communities and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues.
You may visit these and over 500 other poems of provocation and witness inThe Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database-- a digital anthology of poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all Split This Rock programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.
Searchable by social justice theme, author’s identity, state, and geographic region, this database is a unique, rich resource. The Quarry offers poems that will inform and inspire you, your peers, and all with whom you work and collaborate. For search tips, visit Split This Rock's website.
You might consider not only reading these poems but also using them to keep yourself grounded, to open meetings, to share among discussion groups, to email to representatives to encourage them to keep working for the general welfare, or to share with those who might benefit from perspectives different from their own. To learn more about The Quarry and its uses, visit its webpage.
Split This Rock is delighted to announce six nominations for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology. Please join us in celebrating these wonderful poems and poets:
This April, in celebrating National Poetry Month, we announced the 10 most-viewed poems published in Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database, The Quarry, in 2018. We were so excited to share those poems that we decided to highlight EVEN MORE highly-viewed poems from 2018. Behold and be held by this strong stack:
We invite readers to find these poems in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, along with their 600-plus kin. These poems are fuel for the long work of resisting the old world while imagining a new one. The poems are searchable by social justice theme and poet identity. Since its launch in 2015, poems in this collection have been viewed over 350,000 times! You may read previous collections of most-viewed poems at Split This Rock’s blog, Blog This Rock.
The Quarry is available as a free resource for educators, writers, readers, organizers for use as prompts for classes and workshops, to focus discussions and open meetings, in advocacy and community work, and keeping one’s own flame glowing. If you use these poems, or others from The Quarry, in these or other innovative ways, please tell us your story by emailing us at info@splitthisrock.org.
We are delighted to present the 10 most-viewed poems published in Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database, The Quarry, in 2018. Grace Lee Boggs taught that “organizing is to the community what spiritual practice is to the individual.” May these poems support you in both practices, during National Poetry month and beyond.
The three most viewed poems of all-time include two from the suite of poems published in January 2017 in protest of the inauguration: Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love” and Richard Blanco’s "Declaration of Inter-Dependence.” The third all-time, most-viewed poem is also the number one poem of 2018! Here it is along with its powerful companions:
We invite readers to find these poems in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, along with their 600-plus kin. These poems are fuel for the long work of resisting the old world while imagining a new one. The poems are searchable by social justice theme and poet identity. Since its launch in 2015, poems in this collection have been viewed over 350,000 times! You may read previous collections of most-viewed poems at Split This Rock’s blog,Blog This Rock.
The Quarry is available as a free resource for educators, writers, readers, organizers for use as prompts for classes and workshops, to focus discussions and open meetings, in advocacy and community work, and keeping one’s own flame glowing. If you use these poems, or others from The Quarry, in these or other innovative ways, please tell us your story by emailing us at info@splitthisrock.org.
CONTACT: Sarah Browning, Executive Director, 202-787-5210, browning@splitthisrock.org
A Message from Split This Rock Board Chair Susan Scheid
Greetings!
More than ten years ago, the co-founders of Split This Rock cleared a space and planted the seeds for a community garden that became Split This Rock. This garden has been incredibly well tended over the last decade, both by the dedicated leadership of Sarah Browning and other staff, and through the support and love of you, Split This Rock's beloved community.
So it is with gratitude and excitement that I introduce to you the next generation of Split This Rock leadership, Executive Director Rasha Abdulhadi.
You may have met Rasha at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2018, when they served brilliantly as the 10th Anniversary and Festival Fellex. You can read more about Rasha, including a short note from them, below.
Throughout the hiring process, we have all been deeply impressed by Rasha's clarity, vision, and dedication to Split This Rock. They bring more than 16 years' experience in non-profit management and organizational development. I hope you will join us in welcoming Rasha into this new role. Keep an eye out for opportunities to say goodbye and thank you to Sarah and to welcome Rasha in person over the next couple of months. Rasha's first official day is November 26. Sarah's last is January 15, 2019.
On behalf of the entire Board of Directors, I thank you for your support and investment in Split This Rock's work over the last ten years. This garden would never have grown without it! I look forward to your continued investments in the work we have in front of us and in our new leadership.
All the best,
Sue Scheid, Chair, Board of Directors
Meet Rasha Abdulhadi, Split This Rock Executive Director
Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner who grew up between Damascus Syria and rural Georgia and cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. They have worked as a popular educator, cultural organizer, and community technologist, and bring more than a decade and a half of experience in movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice. Rasha is the author of Shell Houses (The Head & The Hand 2017). Their writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Mslexia, Mizna, Room, and |tap| magazine and is anthologized in Halal if You Hear Me (Haymarket 2019), Super Stoked (Capturing Fire 2018), and the Hugo-nominated Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (Twelfth Planet Press 2017). Alongside Sheree Renée Thomas and Erin Roberts, Rasha co-edited a special edition of Strange Horizons featuring speculative fiction by writers of color from the Southeastern US (July 2018).
Rasha has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Split This Rock and is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and Justice for Muslims healing collective. Rasha serves on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS, a 42-year-old member-led arts organization with its origin in Southern Freedom movements. As a practitioner of traditional Palestinian embroidery, Rasha's work is a commitment to bridging communities through the ways we remember, tell stories about, and remake our daily lives.
A Note from Rasha
I enter this leadership role with a full heart and a readiness to work with Split This Rock's staff, board, and beloved community in poetry and social movements. That beloved community has played a major role in my own life as a poet, and that work to convene poets and organizers, locally and nationally, is needed just as urgently now as it was ten years ago--maybe even more so.
As an organizer with family across multiple communities and generations of leadership, I aim to bring the best of my skills as a writer, editor, and organizer to navigate this crucial transition in Split This Rock's life. I look forward to growing this shared work with you all.
CONTACT: Sarah Browning, Executive Director, 202-787-5210, browning@splitthisrock.org
FRANNY CHOI TO JUDGE SPLIT THIS ROCK’S 2019 SONIA SANCHEZ-LANGSTON HUGHES POETRY CONTEST, OPEN UNTIL NOVEMBER 1
Split This Rock’s 2019 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest, judged by Franny Choi, is open for submissions. Now in its 12th year, the annual poetry contest, renamed in 2017, serves to raise the visibility and prestige of poetry of provocation and witness. Winning poems are published on Split This Rock's website and in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. The 1st place recipient receives $500 and the 2nd and 3rd place recipients receive $250 each. All prize winners will receive free festival registration, and the 1st place recipient will be invited to read the winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2020. The deadline to submit is November 1, 2018. Entry fee is $20, supporting Split This Rock’s work to bring poetry to the center of public life.
In an era when political leaders are advancing oppressive measures that put civil rights, the environment, and lives at risk, Split This Rock invites poets to respond with the power of their words. This national contest seeks poems that reach beyond the self to connect with the larger community or world; poems of provocation and witness. The theme can be interpreted broadly and may include but is not limited to work addressing politics, economics, government, war, leadership, issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic class, body image, immigration, heritage, etc.), community, civic engagement, education, activism, history, Americana, and cultural icons. For full details on how to submit, visit Submittable or Split This Rock’s website.
Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and the forthcoming Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Helen Zell Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow, an Editor of News and Politics at Hyphen Magazine, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Franny headlined as a Featured Poet for Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014.
About Split This Rock: Founded in 2008, Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes personal and social change. It calls poets to the center of public life. Core programs are a biennial national poetry festival, city-wide youth programming, contests, readings, workshops, campaigns for social change, and an online database of social justice poems. The only one of its kind highlighting poetry at the intersection of the imagination and social change, Split This Rock Poetry Festival now attracts over 700 poets, activists, and dreamers to DC.
Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts released information confirming that poetry reading is on the rise. Specifically, according to the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar:
28 million U.S. adults read poetry not required for work or school, the highest rate on record over a 15-year period of conducting the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.
Young adults are the fastest growing group of poetry readers among all age groups. Among 18-24-year-olds, the poetry-reading rate has doubled, to 17.5 percent in 2017, up from 8.7 percent in 2012.
African Americans, Asian Americans, and other non-white, non-Hispanic groups now read poetry at the highest rates.
These findings were released in a post on the NEA’s Art Works blog. The data is part of the latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a research partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Census Bureau.
As we celebrate our 10th Anniversary, Split This Rock is proud of our contribution to increasing the audience for poetry in our community. Each year, we engage with thousands of people through readings, open mics, workshops, poetry contests, youth slam festivals, school-based activities, campaigns to integrate poetry into movements for social change, and the award-winning DC Youth Slam Team.
Biennially, our cornerstone program, Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, now attracts approximately 700 poets, activists, and dreamers to our nation's capital. Over 23,000 people have visited our online social justice poetry database, The Quarry, since its creation in 2015. Through a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, all Split This Rock programs aim to celebrate and present poets and poetry that represent the true diversity of our cultures and communities.
Additionally, Split This Rock is part of a national Poetry Coalition, an alliance of more than 20 organizations in 11 cities dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. For the past two years, members of the Poetry Coalition have conducted programming on shared themes of social importance including poetry and migration, and poetry and the body.
We are energized by this new data from the National Endowment for the Arts and the ways in which Split This Rock can, along with our fellow Poetry Coalition members, continue expanding poetry's influence and reach.
Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works 2007). She is a co-founder of Split This Rock and served as its Executive Director from its inception until January 2019. An Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, Sarah is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Adirondack Center for Writing, and the Creative Communities Initiative. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and Poetry magazine. From 2006 until January 2019, Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love Reading & Open Mic poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been an organizer in public housing communities and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues. 
