Who We Are
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©Jill Brazel |
Poets have long played a central role in movements for social change. Today, at a critical juncture in our country’s history, poetry that gives voice to the voiceless, names the unnamable, and speaks directly from the individual and collective conscience is more important than ever. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the centrality of the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.
Our country faces a crisis of imagination. We need dramatic change: to end the wars, reorder our national priorities to meet human needs, save our planet. How we address these challenges is a question not just for policy makers and strategists. It is a question for all of us. We believe poets have a unique role to play in social movements—as innovators, visionaries, truth tellers, and restorers of language.
Poetry and the arts are also vital to youth development and empowering young people to speak out and have confidence in their voices. Our intention is to bridge differences in our city and literary community: to place on the same stage poets who work primarily on the page and poets who write primarily for performance; gay and straight poets; African American, Latino, Asian, white, and Native poets; young poets and older poets; poets with disabilities; poets of all social classes.
Split This Rock believes that as citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. Our intent is twofold: To call poets to a greater role in public life and to bring the vital, important, challenging poetry of witness that is being written by American poets today to a larger and more diverse audience.
The goals of Split This Rock are:
- To celebrate the poetry of witness and provocation being written, published, and performed in the United States today.
- To call poets to a greater role in public life and to equip them with the tools they need to be effective advocates in their communities and in the nation.
The name "Split This Rock" is pulled from a line in “Big Buddy,” a poem from Langston Hughes.
Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.
The work of writing the poems that split open the injustices in society is in some ways a solitary act, but it is also an act that requires community. Split This Rock calls all of us to split this rock, and to do it together.
Staff
Sarah Browning is Director of Split This Rock and DC Poets Against the War, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007), and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004). The recipient of an artist fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, she has also received a Creative Communities Initiative grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. Browning has worked as a community organizer in Boston public housing and as a political organizer for reproductive rights, gay rights, and electoral reform, and against poverty, South African apartheid, and U.S. militarism. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute — creative writing workshops for low-income women and youth — and Assistant Director of The Fund for Women Artists, an organization supporting socially engaged art by women. She has written essays and interviewed poets and artists for a variety of publications.
Alicia Gregory is Split This Rock's Program Assistant and a graduate of Hobart & William Smith Colleges with a B.A in English and Africana Studies. In 2007 she spent five months living and studying in South Africa. Alicia was the assistant editor of her school’s literary magazine and journal of global perspectives, and now provides invaluable support to Split This Rock.
Katherine Howell volunteers as Split This Rock's Communications and Development Assistant and Blog Goddess. She helps oversee content at Blog This Rock and writes reviews of books by Split This Rock poets. She received her M.A. in English from Boston College in 2006 and has spent her time since teaching writing. She is currently a Lecturer in Writing at George Washington University.
Bob LaVallee Split This Rock's Acting Assistant Director, has 20 years of nonprofit management experience. Among other roles, he was a Senior Program Associate at The Finance Project in Washington, DC, the Director of Community and School-Based Initiatives for DotWell in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Director of Finance and Operations for City On A Hill Charter Public High School in Boston, Massachusetts. In these roles he developed a deep knowledge of nonprofit management practices and how to support mission-driven organizations. He is the author, with Kate Sandel, of Beyond the Checkbook: A Financial Management Guide for Leaders of Small Youth-Serving Organizations (2009). He holds a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Non-Profit Management from Boston University and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. He is married to the poet Eleanor Graves.
Jonathan B. Tucker is a performance poet, facilitator, youth worker/advocate, community organizer and coach of the DC Youth Slam Team. He uses performance art to start conversations about social justice issues, focusing his efforts primarily on engaging and supporting young artists and activists in the DC/MD/VA area. He has led high school students on year-long journeys with Operation Understanding DC, exploring cross-cultural dialogue and traveling down south to study the Civil Rights Movement. He is currently a grantee with the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities’ Young Artists Program, using spoken word poetry as a vehicle for peer education around HIV/AIDS with a group from Children’s Hospital called Teens Against the Spread of AIDS. Jonathan also works with Teaching for Change and regularly hosts open mics and slams at Busboys and Poets, BloomBars, The Fridge, and other community art spaces in which he also teaches creative writing and performance.
Board of Directors
Regie Cabico is the Director of Split This Rock’s World & Me youth poetry contest and Artistic Director for Sol & Soul. Cabico is a poet, playwright, and spoken word performer. He took top prizes at the 1993, 1994, and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies and he co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. He received a NYFA Artist Fellowship for Poetry in 1997, NYFAs in 2003 for Poetry and Performance Art, and two Brooklyn Arts Council Poetry Awards. Cabico has been a teacher for Urban Word and developed a poetry and performance program for teens with psychiatric illness at Bellevue Hospital. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers in recognition of his work with diverse communities.
Noura Erakat is a Palestinian-American activist and lawyer. Based in the DC area, she is presently working on domestic policy in a Congressional subcommittee. Prior to attending law school, she helped launch the divestment campaign along with the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley. Noura continues to help build the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement across U.S.-based university campuses and communities in an effort to end Israeli Apartheid. While at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, she developed an Anti-Apartheid Framework Training Curriculum. In addition to activism, Noura is also a cultural worker. Her works include numerous poems published in Mizna, Cipatli, the Incite Anthology as well as two theater pieces. Her revolving monologue Pulse of the Intifada which was based on oral histories she collected from the West Bank in the first month of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was selected as Al-Phan’s 2003 play of the year. Her monologue Visiting Palestine was selected by Incite: Women of Color Against Violence to be a part of its national tour, SisterFire. She also produced a radio documentary, “We Refuse to Forget: Commemorating the 20-year Anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre” which was nominated for the Golden Reel 2002 award for Best Local Documentary. Most recently she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown where she examined the political bias influencing cases involving the Arab-Israeli conflict in U.S. federal courts. Noura has spoken at college campuses, in churches, and community centers nationally. She has also appeared on national and international television programs including Al Jazeera International, MSNBC, HBO’s “Politically Incorrect” and Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Yael Flusberg’s life’s work integrates activism, teaching, and advising with the literary and healing arts. Yael attributes her love of combining the written word with social justice values to being the first-generation US-born daughter of a newspaper printer and a genocide survivor. In addition to her poetry and essay writing, Yael brings 20 years of experience developing strategy, catalyzing organizational change, and enhancing leadership capacity with diverse communities to the Split This Rock board. She has served as a co-founder, consultant, and Board member of many nonprofits. Since 1996, Yael has worked as the Director of Y Elements: Practices for Transformation, a boutique firm which offers nonprofit and philanthropic leaders, social entrepreneurs, and artists an integrative line of services which include executive coaching; strategy and planning; training and facilitation; resource development; writing workshops; and somatic practices. Yael has a Master of Science in International Development Management from the American University, and is a certified yoga and Reiki teacher. Her book, The Last of My Village, won Poetica Magazine's 2010 Chapbook Contest. Yael is Split This Rock's Board Secretary.
Jaime Lee Jarvis, Board Chair, has been a part of Split This Rock since first volunteering in 2007. She was Volunteer Coordinator for the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008, and has assisted with web content and program materials since then. Jaime holds a master’s degree in professional writing and has 10 years of experience in proposal development, web-based communications, and information management. She works as a writer/editor for an international development organization, but has also been a literacy tutor, a Peace Corps volunteer, a hotel bellhop, and a corporate librarian. Her poem, "Aral," was a Split This Rock Poem of the Week on November 2, 2010.
Micheline Klagsbrun studied in Paris with Alfredo Echeverria and at the Corcoran with Bill Newman. She has exhibited widely, and is in private collections nationally as well as in Europe and the Middle East. Recent solo and group exhibits in Washington D.C. include gallery plan b, Studio Gallery, Exhibit9 Gallery, the Embassy of Finland and the Corcoran Gallery of Art; elsewhere, Macy Gallery (New York City), Aswan, Egypt and Delhi, India. She is co-founder and President of CrossCurrents Foundation (founded in 2006) which as part of its mission sponsors art to promote social justice. The current project is BrushFire, a national series of public art projects in the run-up to the Fall '08 elections that use the arts to heighten public engagement with key social issues, culminating in September 2008 with an exhibition at the Katzen Arts Center at American University. This exhibition featured prominent artists and documented the public art projects that BrushFire is presenting nationally. http://signalfire.provisionslibrary.org.
Klagsbrun has a background as a Clinical Psychologist (Tavistock Institute, London: G.W.U. Medical Center). For many years she co-chaired the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film (now the Forum on Media and the Mind), co-edited their journal “Projections” and chaired a seminar on Psychoanalysis and Film (the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities: Washington School of Psychiatry).
Anas (“Andy”) Shallal is an Iraqi-American artist, activist, and businessman, owner of Busboys and Poets. He is a Foreign Policy in Focus Analyst, board member of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a spokesperson for Education for Peace in Iraq Center. He is the co-founder of The Peace Café, which promotes Arab and Jewish dialogue and improved understanding. He is the recipient of the Fairfax County Human Rights Award; the Jefferson Medal, the highest honor for volunteerism in the United States; and the United Nations Human Rights Community Award.
Melissa Tuckey is the author of Rope as Witness, a chapbook published by Puddinghouse Press. She’s received a Fine Arts Work Center residency, among other awards for her writing. Her poetry has been anthologized in DC Poets Against the War, Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, Poets for Palestine, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of Writers Corps in Poetry and Prose, and is forthcoming in Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology. Melissa is co-translator with Chun Ye and Fiona Sze-Lorrain of Chinese poet Yang Zi’s collected works, which have been published by Conjunctions, Manoa, Witness, and other journals. She serves as Poetry Editor at the online journal Foreign Policy in Focus (a think tank without walls). Melissa Tuckey teaches at Ithaca College, and lives in Ithaca, New York. She has been with Split This Rock since its inception and served as a founding co-director before joining the Board of Directors.
Dan Vera is the author of The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008). His poems appear in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Delaware Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Gargoyle, Ishmael Reed's Konch, and Undefined, and the anthologies Divining Divas, Full Moon On K Street, Dog Blessings, and DC Poets Against the War. He is co-founder of Vrzhu Press, publisher of Souvenir Spoon Books, edits the Gay culture journal White Crane, co-hosts reading series through the poetry incubator Poetry Mutual of America. He is also one of the creators of DC Writer Houses (with Kim Roberts). For more visit www.danvera.com.
Festival Advisory Committee
Naomi Ayala is a teacher, education consultant, freelance writer and translator. Her first book of poetry, Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press, 1997), was selected by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her second book, This Side of Early, was published by Curbstone to great acclaim in 2009. Ayala’s poetry has appeared in such journals as Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Caribbean Writer, and The Massachusetts Review. She has received two artist fellowships from the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis graduated with a MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from American University. She is a Cave Canem fellow. She has had poems published in many anthologies, including Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam and Cave Canem: Gathering Ground and online at Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She is the Poetry and Lectures Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library and was formerly a producer with WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show.
Kyle G. Dargan is the founding editor of Post No Ills magazine. His debut collection of poems, The Listening, won the 2003 Cave Canem Prize, and his poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, The Root, and Shenandoah. He was most recently the Managing Editor of Callaloo. Dargan has received fellowships to attend the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as a scholarship to attend The Fine Arts Work Center. His second collection of poems, Bouquet of Hungers, was released in 2008 by the University of Georgia press. He was judge of Split This Rock’s inaugural poetry contest for adult writers in 2008.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a board member at The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore. The author of several collections of poems, his last book is How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (Curbstone Press 2004). His memoir, The Fifth Inning (PM Press) was released in 2009. Mr. Miller is the Board Chair for the Institute for Policy Studies, and since 1974 has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. He is the former Chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and a former core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College.
Carolyn Forché is Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and Professor of English at Georgetown University. Known as a “poet of witness,” she is the author of four books of poetry. Her first poetry collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her second book, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1982), received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 1994, her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (HarperCollins), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was published by HarperCollins in Spring 2003. Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 1993.
Sam Hamill is the author of more than forty books, including fifteen volumes of original poetry (most recently Measured by Stone and Almost Paradise: New & Selected Poems & Translations); four collections of literary essays, including A Poet’s Work and Avocations: On Poetry & Poets; and some of the most distinguished translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics of the last half-century. He co-founded, and for thirty-two years was editor at, Copper Canyon Press. He taught in prisons for fourteen years and has worked extensively with battered women and children. An outspoken political pacifist, in 2003, declining an invitation to the White House, he founded Poets Against War, compiling the largest single-theme poetry anthology in history. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He presently divides his time between his studio in Port Townsend, Washington, and Buenos Aires.
Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. His volumes of poetry include A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); The Book of Nightmares (1971); Body Rags (1968); Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964); and What a Kingdom It Was (1960). He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, and François Villon, and, this year, Rainer Maria Rilke. Kinnell divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker's collection The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her other books of poetry include The Crack in Everything (1996), a National Book Award finalist that won both the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award; and The Imaginary Lover (1986), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. She has written several critical works, including Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (2000), The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994), and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986).
Kim Roberts is the author of two books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH, 1994). She is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and co-editor of Delaware Poetry Review. She has done extensive research on the literary history of Washington, DC, publishing articles and tours on Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, among others. Kim is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington. She has been awarded writer's residencies from twelve artist colonies. She is also one of the creators of DC Writer Houses (with Dan Vera).