Split This Rock’s Fall 2025 Slate of Programs

Image Description: Over a black background, a bold white heading: "Upcoming Events." Below, three rectangles with November 2025 virtual workshop and reading dates, titles, and facilitator names. Over the two rectangles with virtual workshop information, there is a light purple callout bubble that reads "LIMITED SEATS!" At the bottom is a website icon with a URL: splitthisrock.org.

This November, we invite you to join us for virtual writing workshops and a poetry reading!

As Split This Rock makes strides to close an unprecedented funding gap, community support continues to uplift the work we do. We are overwhelmed with gratitude for all of the donations and offers of support we have received over the past two months.

These invigorating virtual offerings have been made possible by the generosity of poets who have offered to donate their time and talents. With their help and yours, Split This Rock can bridge our funding gap and continue our work of materially supporting poets who are often underrepresented, excluded, and erased from the literary landscape. Each registration supports our campaign, and we are still fundraising to unlock a $25,000 challenge grant from the Poetry Foundation, which means every gift goes twice as far!

Join us to reclaim, salvage, and remember what powers and sustains us. We hope to share space with you this fall!

LIMITED SEATS! Virtual Writing Workshop with Gabriel Ramirez

Image Description: Split This Rock's red logo is at the top of a light grey box with a black border. Bold black text reads "I AM HERE: AFFIRMATION AS RESISTANCE. Virtual Writing Workshop. Friday, November 7, 2025. 6:30-8 pm ET. Tickets $60-$100. Featuring Gabriel Ramirez." Over aqua and orange shapes, there is a photo of Gabriel Ramirez wearing a baseball cap and a brown leather jacket with a white collared shirt and patterned vest. Photo by Boujee Mustard.

I AM HERE: AFFIRMATION AS RESISTANCE

Friday, November 7, 2025, 6:30-8 pm ET
Tickets $60-$100
First come, first serve: limited $30 scholarships available!

A catalyst to choosing ourselves through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth, “I Am Here: Affirmation as Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to what has made us feel small, invisible, and impossible. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from childhood, someone who told you that you can’t, or a country with systems that have shown they don't care whether you are alive, it’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth.

Gabriel Ramirez, author of the chapbook IF PIT BULLS HAD A GOD IT’D BE A PIT BULL (The Head & The Hand Press) and the children’s book We’re Community, is a Queer Afro-Caribbean writer, performer, and educator. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal and 2024-2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow, Gabriel has received fellowships from the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, and Miami Book Fair, and been a graduate fellow at The Watering Hole and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre, The National Museum of Romanian Literature, and other venues & universities around the nation. You can find their work in various spaces, including YouTube, and in publications like Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, BOMB, Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019), The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020), and Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (Library of America 2024). Learn more about Gabriel Ramirez @RamirezPoet and at their website.

REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

 

LIMITED SEATS! Virtual Writing Workshop with Ana Portnoy Brimmer

Image Description: Split This Rock's red logo is at the top of a light grey box with a black border. Bold black text reads "ODES: THE ART OF SALVAGING. Virtual Writing Workshop. Thursday, November 13, 2025. 6:30-8 pm ET. Tickets $60-$100.Featuring Ana Portnoy Brimmer." Over aqua and orange shapes, there is a photo of Ana Portnoy Brimmer sitting with an open book in her hands and smiling softly. She wears a bright yellow button down shirt, sparkly green earrings, and a gold ring. Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

ODES: THE ART OF SALVAGING

Thursday, November 13, 2025, 6:30-8 pm ET
Tickets $60-$100
First come, first serve: limited $30 scholarships available!

The ode, commonly understood as a ceremonious and celebratory form, an homage or tribute to a subject of the poet’s choosing, is also an exercise in retrieval. As we inhabit homelands and a world of unrelenting crises, engaging in the act of rescuing the disregarded and seemingly ordinary can be a defiant move against the manufactured precarity that insists on consuming us whole. In this workshop, we will explore how the ode as a contemporary form can function as a tactic to salvage all that which slips through the cracks, “buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives,” as the poet Adrienne Rich would put it. And how through this unearthing, odes can help us recover what is oftentimes forcefully wrung from our selves—our memory, our joy, our hope.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a poet and translator from Puerto Rico. To Love an Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Que tiemble, a derivative work in Spanish, was published with La Impresora in 2023. Aimer Une Île, a French translation of Que tiemble by Benjamin Haroun Montesano, was published with Editorial Pulpo in 2025. Ana is a 2024 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence Program Alumna, was awarded a 2023 MASS MoCA Fellowship for Artists from Puerto Rico, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, among others. Ana is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants and she resides in Puerto Rico.

REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

 

SAVE THE DATE: Trans Ruckus Poetry Reading

Image Description: Split This Rock's red logo is at the top of a semi-transparent white rectangle with a slightly faded rainbow-colored frame. The graphic reads "[Split This Rock] presents TRANS RUCKUS, a virtual poetry reading honoring trans day of remembrance. Hosted & curated by Kay Ulanday Barrett. Save the Date: Thursday, November 20." 

TRANS RUCKUS

Thursday, November 20, 2025
Virtual Poetry Reading

Join Split This Rock and Kay Ulanday Barrett for a dynamic reading honoring Trans Day of Remembrance with Trans Ruckus: A Trans Non-Binary Celebration of Poetry. We're going to usher Trans poetry on our virtual stage!

Hosted and curated by Kay Ulanday Barrett, and featuring poets Chrysanthemum,  Ezra Fox, Jimena Lucero, Zuggie Tate, and Cai Sherley, Trans Ruckus aims to honor Transgender and Non-Binary poetry through remembrance and celebration.

Trans poetics is a vibrant force to reclaim, to archive lineages, and to plot our futures with care and candor.

Stay tuned for registration information in the coming weeks!

ABOUT THE HOST & CURATOR

KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ Napper. They are a 2024-2025 Disabled Futures Fellow awarded by The Ford Foundation and United States Artists. He is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. They have attended residences at Tin House, Millay Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Macondo, and was a James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell. Their work has been published by The New York Times, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Vogue, Brevity, and more. Their book More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) is a Stonewall Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. For more info, visit Kay's website and @Brownroundboi on social media.

Image Description: A light brown, round, queer performs at a microphone with transgender and rainbow flags in the background. They wear a gray blazer and glasses.
 

ABOUT THE READERS

	CHRYSANTHEMUM is a poet and performance artist. She serves as Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam and Writer-in-Residence for the Providence Commemoration Lab. She is a recipient of fellowships from Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary, which named her LGBTQ Writers in Schools’ inaugural Poet-in-Residence for the LGBTQ+ Youth Poet Laureate Residency. In 2016, she became the first trans woman finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam, and her teams won the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam and the first-ever FEM Slam. With Justice Ameer, she staged ANTHEM at American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. She was born to Vietnamese parents in Oklahoma. Image Description: The poet Chrysanthemum stands outdoors and faces the camera with a wall and window behind her. She has golden skin and chest-length dark hair, and wears translucent glasses with a red-and-white patterned dress. Photo by Zach Oren.
	EZRA FOX is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. A Tin House and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship for promising transgender writers, Ezra’s work appears in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and was selected as a finalist for poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Bellingham Review and Birdcoat Quarterly. More of their work can be found at their website, or on Instagram @ezraxfox. Image Description: Ezra, a Black trans masc poet with a large curly afro and gold septum ring, sits on concrete steps leaning forward with their arms resting on their knees, looking directly at the camera. They wear a beige polo with brown striped accents and dark green pants. Photo by Sarah Deragon.
	JIMENA LUCERO is a writer, actor, and cultural worker from New York City. Jimena was a 2019-2020 Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project. Her writing appears in Zoeglossia, The Recluse, Entropy Magazine, Poetry Center, Center for Book Arts, and elsewhere. Her short film Silver Femme won the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Silver Femme has screened at Outfest Fusion, Inside Out, the Museum of Modern Art, and more. Jimena’s work is rooted in trans liberation, disability justice, and future building. Find her on Instagram at @Jimena_lu. Image Description: Jimena Lucero, a queer brown Latinx woman with her hair parted down the middle; she is wearing large dangly earrings, a black off the shoulder top, and has her face slightly turned away from the camera.
	ZUGGIE TATE (she/her) is a poet and spoken word artist with a BA in Sociology from Case Western Reserve University. Her work is rooted in her intersectional identity as a Black, Trans, Larger-Bodied, Poverty-Born Woman living with invisible disabilities. A fellow at Twelve Literary Arts, Assembly of the Arts, and The Watering Hole, she has also participated in workshops by Torch Literary Arts. She is also a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2025 Literary Cleveland Amplify Fellow. Through her poetry, Zuggie seeks to celebrate, center, and affirm Black Trans Women while inviting broader audiences into empathy, re-education, and acceptance. Her Instagram is @teachmehowtozuggie. Image Description: Zuggie Tate is black Trans woman wearing a gold septum piercing with a I light blue gem and whose head and shoulders are draped with a pink scarf.
	CAI SHERLEY (he/they) is a Black trans poet-educator with roots in Boston, MA. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, you can find his work in Best New Poets 2022, swamp pink, and Peach Mag, among others. His poetry focuses on excavating Black trans masculine histories and has been supported by The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, Tin House, and Lambda Literary. He now serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, is a proud member of the Crossroads Writers Collective, and is a stepdad to two sphynxes. Image Description: A lighter-skinned Black trans masculine person is photographed from the shoulders up, wearing a black lapel shirt with one dangly pearl earring, a gold septum ring, and rectangular glasses. He has a high top fade. The background is a blur of green bushes.