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Program & Schedule: Sunday, March 23, 2008

Online Registration Closed

Festival contact

Split This Rock will enter a fallow season on July 1, 2021, and all of our external programming and publishing efforts are on pause until April 1, 2022. We’re excited for time to dig into deeper wells of creativity for: 1) expanding the organizations’ capacity for working towards liberation; 2) defining more concretely what working towards liberation means at Split This Rock; 3) increasing the impact of our poetry, resistance, and community building offerings; and 4) more deeply aligning the organization’s mission with its systems, protocols, and practices. Learn more about the inspiration, projects, and goals for fallow season at the News from Split This Rock webpage. Visit the fallow season webpage to explore responses to frequently asked questions. We’re eager to continue engaging with you! To be invited to fallow season community gatherings we’ll be hosting, be sure to complete this online form.

The Split This Rock Poetry Festival brought poets and writers to Washington, D.C. on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, in the midst of the presidential election, for four days of collaboration, learning, and performance. The festival featured readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, and walking tours—opportunities to build community and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change. Hundreds joined us as we celebrated poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination.

The official bookseller of the festival is Busboys and Poets Books. Visit the store or website to find progressive books to activate your mind and community, run by Teaching for Change.

Thursday, March 20 Friday, March 21 Saturday, March 22 Sunday, March 23

9:30-11 a.m.    Panel

DC Poets Against the War

Sarah Browning, Esther Iverem, Joseph Ross, Melissa Tuckey

Split This Rock Poetry Festival is the progeny of DC Poets Against the War. Local activists and members of DC Poets Against the War meet to talk about the origins of the movement, and to share poems and stories of five years of organizing and resistance here in DC and globally. This is also an opportunity to brainstorm about next steps for Split This Rock.

Noon                 Featured Reading

Galway Kinnell
Sharon Olds

1:00- 3 p.m.       Silent March to White House for closing ceremony       

We will walk five city blocks from the reading to Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Please bring signs with art and poetry as well as a favorite line from a poem (12 word maximum), reflecting your peace and justice hopes, for a collaborative Cento poem to be read in Split This Rock’s closing ceremony.