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Split This Rock’s Winter 2026 Slate of Programs

Split This Rock is thrilled to share our Winter slate of programs. We hope many of you will join us to read, write, and create together in the new year! 

These virtual offerings are 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 a $68,750 funding gap and continue our work of materially supporting poets who are often underrepresented, excluded, and erased from the literary landscape.

Tickets

Tickets for workshops and readings are offered on a sliding scale. Tickets can be purchased though each event's Zeffy registration page, linked below. All ticket sales support Split This Rock's fundraising efforts and sustain our urgent work. Thank you for your support! 

Accessibility 

Accessibility is a core value for Split This Rock. We strive to provide programs, materials, and communications that allow people within the disability community to engage fully. 

  • Workshops: Zoom auto-captions will be provided. Written versions of poem prompts and poems used for discussion will be provided via screen share, the chat, or links.
  • Readings: On-screen ASL interpretation, Zoom auto-captions, and a document formatted for screen readers with poet bios & poem text will be provided. 

Let us know of any accessibility questions or accommodation requests via the event registration form or by emailing info@splitthisrock.org with "ACCESS REQUEST" in the subject line. Requests received at least two weeks or more befoe the program date give us our best chance at fulfillment. Given our ongoing funding challenges, we cannot promise accessibility services, but will do our best to provide accommodations. 

Sick & Disabled Showcase: A Virtual Poetry Reading

Over an abstract pastel blue, purple, and pink background, Split This Rock's red logo appears above bold text which reads:

Image Description: Over an abstract pastel blue, purple, and pink background, Split This Rock's red logo appears above bold text which reads: "[Split This Rock] presents Sick & Disabled Showcase: a virtual poetry reading featuring Kay Ulanday Barrett, Arianna Monet, Ina Cariño, MT Vallarta, Amir McClam, Tala Khanmalek, and Joselia Hughes." Below, six photos of the featured poets with their names across the bottom of each photo. Joselia Hughes' name appears below the collaged photos. At the bottom, text with the date, time, and ticket prices: "February 5, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST. Tickets $5-20."


Gather with Split This Rock and Kay Ulanday Barrett for the Sick & Disabled Showcase, a poetry reading featuring Arianna Monet, Ina Cariño, MT Vallarta, Amir McClam, Tala Khanmalek, and Joselia Hughes. The reading will take place virtually on Thursday, February 5, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST. Tickets are offered on a sliding scale and start at $5.

BUY TICKETS TO THE SICK & DISABLED SHOWCASE

Learn more about our lineup of brilliant sick and disabled readers: 

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.

ABOUT THE POETS

Amir McClam (they/them) is a poet-educator, clay worker, and spiritualist from Buffalo, New York. Their work explores Black queer and trans feminisms, creative embodiment, and the personal and relational healing that sows the seeds for social transformation. Amir is a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow and has been awarded additional fellowships and scholarships from the Schomburg Center and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Amir's poems can be found in Nimrod International Journal and The Amistad. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and BS in Psychology from Howard University. They teach writing independently and at Cornell.

MT Vallarta (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, disabled poet and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. They are the author of the poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember, winner of the 2022 Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Kundiman, and Abode Press, while their creative writing and scholarship is published and forthcoming in Psaltery and Lyre, The Selkie, Shō, Amerasia Journal, The Asian American Literary Review, and others. They live on Northern Chumash lands, in Santa Maria, CA.

Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry originally from Baguio City in the Philippines. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, The Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. Their forthcoming collection Reverse Requiem is slated for publication in April 2026 (Alice James Books). In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform aiming to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.

Arianna Monet (she/they) is a queer Black poet and strawberry ice cream enthusiast from eastern Massachusetts.  In the wake of a disabling event with a restructuring effect on her cognition, much of her artistic practice is concerned with the capacity of poetic form to function as a kind of assistive tech. In addition to being a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow, Arianna is a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow and was a member of the 2019 Boston Poetry Slam Team. Their work can be found with Button Poetry, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.

Joselia Hughes is a writer and artist based in New York. Joselia is visual arts teaching faculty at Lincoln Center Education. Joselia’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her writing has been published in Apogee Journal, Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Project, Split This Rock's The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, Blackflash Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Art at Bard College.

Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer, disabled, Iranian writer, editor, and scholar. Their poetry has appeared in Split This Rock's beloved Poem of the Week Series for which they also served as a First Reader.

BUY TICKETS TO THE SICK & DISABLED SHOWCASE

 

Virtual Writing Workshops

Split This Rock’s red logo at the top. Over a black background, a bold white heading:

Image Description: Split This Rock’s red logo at the top. Over a black background, a bold white heading: "Upcoming Virtual Poetry Workshops." Below, five ticket-shaped boxes with virtual workshop dates, titles, and facilitator names. Workshop Schedule: Jan. 14 with Jorrell Watkins, Jan. 22 with Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin, Feb. 11 with Khadijah Queen, Feb. 19 with Hanif Abdurraqib, Feb. 25 with Ra Avis. At the bottom is a website icon with a URL: splitthisrock.org.

Learn more about each workshop and the featured poets below and on the event registration pages.

Workshops take place 6:30-8 pm EST. Tickets for virtual writing workshops are sliding scale: $30 / $60 / $100. 

100 Years and Then Some—Blues Poetry with Jorrell Watkins
Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST

In this poetry workshop, we will study blues poetry through listening to music, reading lyrics/poems, and writing our own blues. Though our primary focus will be craft, especially on contemporary blues aesthetics and practice, we will ground our work with a discussion about the historical context of “The blues.”

Jorrell Watkins is from Richmond, VA. He is an alum of Hampshire College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He received fellowships from the Association of University Centers on Disabilities, Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook If Only the Sharks Would Bite won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry. He is also the coauthor of Studies in Brotherly Love (Prompt Press, 2021), a poetry chapbook based on Malcolm Corley’s paintings, with Claretta Holsey, DJ Savarese, and Lateef McLeod. His debut full-length collection, PlayHouse was published by Northwestern University Press, Curbstone Books in 2024. Currently, he lives in LA and is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at USC.

Unruly, Ungovernable, Unfathomable Poetry with Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin
Thursday, January 22, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST

What makes a poem, a poem? Who’s to say whether something isn’t a poem? How do you know if what a poem describes is true or false, fact or fiction, and does it matter? Who decides who the poets are? In this workshop with Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin, you will unpack and rewrite the so-called “rules” of writing poems, read work by some of the greatest rulebreakers of poetry, and lean into the boundless and ever-expanding possibilities of poetry by writing poems that defy form, technique, language, societal norms, oppressive systems, empires, and even reality itself.

Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose work revolves around themes of dreaming, fantasizing, and futurizing, and focuses on topics of diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. They are a Press Editor for Half Mystic Press, a Co-Coordinator for Sundress Publications’ Poets in Pajamas reading series, and an Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in The Offing, Oroboro, fifth wheel press, Vănguard, and other publications. They have been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more.

Writing The Modern Fairy Tale  with Khadijah Queen
Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST

The fairy tale is an ancient storytelling mode rich with modern possibilities. Magic, unique logic, parable, impossible romance, evil villains, magical creatures, unexpected heroes—all tools for telling stories in fiction, poetry, drama, and even nonfiction.In this multi-genre writing workshop, we’ll analyze both age-old and contemporary examples of the fairy tale, and apply fairytale techniques to our own writing. With assistance from the scholarly essay "Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale" by Kate Bernheimer, we will cover the differences between folk tales, myths, parables, legends, and other types of stories adjacent to the fairytale. Representative authors include Edwidge Danticat, Ilya Kaminsky, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Kiki Petrosino, Linda Hogan, and others.

Khadijah Queen is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Legacy Lit/Hachette August 2025), a memoir about her family, her time in the U.S. Navy in the 1990s, and brief histories of women at sea. In 2025 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts recognized Queen’s work with the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry. Born near Detroit and raised in L.A., she teaches literature and creative writing at Virginia Tech and Antioch University Los Angeles. She is currently finishing a new poetry collection and is, slowly, working on several other prose projects.

Language As Symphony, Poet As Conductor with Hanif Abdurraqib
Thursday, February 19, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST

In this workshop we are going to focus on how language choice, repetition and return impacts the sonic qualities of a poem, not just as it is read out loud, but also the structure of language on the page as a portal into teaching a reader how to hear what you would like them to hear. We are going to both enter this exploration using texts of poems, but also songs, and song lyrics.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. 

Shaping the Pulse of Your Work with Ra Avis
Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 6:30-8 pm EST

Every poem carries a hidden heartbeat. This workshop centers on revision as a path toward uncovering it. Through gentle prompts, we’ll practice techniques for clarifying intention, strengthening imagery, and cutting what obscures the story. Whether you’re polishing a draft or beginning something new, you’ll leave with tools to transform your work from early idea to essential truth.

Ra Avis (she/her) is an artist, community builder, and an award-winning blogger. She is a 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow with Haymarket Books. Ra’s storytelling blends personal vulnerability with systemic critique, always centering the tender stretch toward something more than survival. She is the founder of Kites Library, a free archive of resource-sharing mini zines, and a co-founding organizer of the Biggest Little Zine Fair.