8:30am – 5:30pm FESTIVAL REGISTRATION

Human Rights Campaign, Equality Forum [Map]

11:30am – 1:00pm

Citizen Poet Queer: Building a Blueprint for LGBTQ Cultural Activism
Julie Enszer, David Groff, Reginald Harris, Donika Ross
Human Rights Campaign, Room 105C [Map]

Storytelling and personal witness in poetry—as well as personal essays, op-eds, articles, blogs and advocacy journalism—are potent tools for cultural transformation. How can you find your voice and then raise it in the movement for social justice? This panel explores how the power of your poetry—and the informed passion of your prose—can challenge the norms of the LGBTQ community and the larger culture and help engender a more honest and authentic society. Offering specific strategies, guidelines, and venues for reaching readers both queer and straight, this panel will give poets the adaptable blueprint we need to engage in activist cultural citizenship through our poems—both performed and on the page—our poetry activism, and our literary, social, narrative, and political writing, as we seek to make art that opens hearts and changes lives.

Crossing the Boundaries of the Self: Writing Through Others’ Stories
Kyle Dargan, Yvette Neisser Moreno, Travis Roberts, Joseph Ross
Charles Sumner School, Room 102 [Map]

One powerful method for writing poetry that “bears witness” to events we haven’t experienced ourselves is to write through someone else’s experience, taking on that person’s voice and/or telling their story. Such poems may give voice to events or voices at the margin of mainstream society, or may draw attention to a different perspective on historical or current events. Panelists will read two poems each and discuss questions that arise, such as: When writing about someone else’s experience, how do you decide whether to use the first, second, or third person? How can you be sure that you are conveying that person’ s experience accurately? What kind of research should you do, if any? What are the challenges, rewards, and possible pitfalls of writing beyond “what you know”?

As performance poetry and slam competition grow in popularity, many organizations are using the energetic and entertaining format of slam to engage, inspire, and motivate young students. In this interactive workshop, Split This Rock’s award-winning youth workers will discuss the benefits and challenges of slam poetry programs and facilitate dialogue among participants about best practices and how to reach and motivate more students using poetry.

Using Art and Poetry Created by Children and Teens in Wartime to Bring Activism for Peace into the Classroom
Merna Ann Hecht
Charles Sumner School, Room 101 [Map]

Using examples of children’s visual art and poetry from the Spanish Civil War, Gaza, Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia, this workshop will demonstrate how this artwork is essential to effective social justice education. Poetry created by recently arrived teenage refugees from Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, and Nepal will also be introduced to further the discussion about the urgency of integrating the devastating effects of war and the possibilities for creating peace into public school curricula. Participants will write persona poems in order to experience the ways high school and college students can understand war through direct interaction with artistic expressions about the trauma of violent conflict and forced migrations. Handouts include writing prompts, poetry examples, and an extensive bibliography of children’s and young adult literature, poetry, and visual art related to war and peace.

We’d Like to Have Words with You: A Poetry Reading and Conversation with Two Generations of VONA/Voices Writers
Elmaz Abinader, Ruth Forman, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Andrea Walls
Charles Sumner School, Room 300 [Map]
The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices) has been nurturing and supporting emerging writers of color for fourteen years. We find that our workshop participants grow not only from the workshops we offer but also from discussions and interactions within the VONA/Voices Community. The conversations that span subjects from craft to living the life of a writer, from bilingual texts to publishing, are essential to prepare writers of color to enter the literary terrain. This themed reading attempts to duplicate some of that interaction, combining a reading with discussion involving faculty and former students.

2:00pm – 3:30pm

Affrilachia: Affrilachian Poets on Identity, Place & Landscape
Gerald Coleman, Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Kelly Norman Ellis, Crystal Good, Randall Horton, Ellen Hagan, Norman Jordan, Bianca Spriggs, Keith Wilson, Shayla Wolfs-Lawson
Charles Sumner School, Room 300 [Map]

The Affrilachian Poets is a multi-cultural writing collective representing the Appalachian region, a mountain range stretching over thirteen states along the East Coast. Since 1991, the Affrilachian Poets have been writing together, defying the persistent stereotype of a racially homogenized rural region. They continue to reveal relationships that link identity to familial roots, socio-economic stratification and cultural influence, and an inherent connection to the land. This reading will feature current members of the Affrilachian Poets sharing their new work, with a Q&A session at the end.

Beauty, Disability, Queerness & Body Politic
L. Lamar Wilson, Kathi Wolfe
Human Rights Campaign, Room 105A [Map]
Two LGBT poets who also have a disability read from their work, which focuses on the intersection of disability, queerness, race, peace, class, and other cultural/social/political issues. Discussion follows. The panelists will respond to each other’s work and discuss such questions as: How have disability, queerness, and other issues such as race intersected for you in your own life? How do images of beauty, the body, queerness, and disability intersect in the body politic–in our culture–in cultural stereotypes/myths? Audience members are encouraged to ask questions of the poets – to talk about their own images of beauty, disability, queerness, and the body.

Mapping the Selves: Compulsion & Resistance in Autobiographical Poetry
Kenyatta Rogers, Aricka Foreman, Keith S. Wilson, Raina Lauren Fields
Human Rights Campaign, Room 105C [Map]
How does writing our selfhood operate as a political act? Rather than look to the personal as “confessional,” this panel will consider the autobiographical impulse to write our lives as a means, for some, of writing for our lives. Looking to Yusef Komunyakaa, Toi Derricotte, Natasha Trethewey, and Kimiko Hahn, we discuss the necessary risk of navigating the interior life, and explore the private sphere as a vast landscape for personal, political, and social resistance. By giving ourselves permission to write into ourselves, we give our communal spaces the opportunity to expand, ensuring that each of us has the room to explore the power of our own agency.

Rethinking the City: Poetic Strategies for Renewing Urban Space
Jennifer Karmin, Claudia La Rocco, Pireeni Sundaralingam
Wilderness Society Conference Room [Map]

Urban lives are designed and controlled as never before. This roundtable brings together a diverse range of poets from different schools of poetry whose work is united in challenging the homogeneity of cities, and whose work and practices create new ways to visualize and interact with the landscapes in which we live.The roundtable will provide a much-needed platform through which to compare the artistic interventions being used in different cities, and to examine how individual citizen-artists can play a role in reshaping urban environments through art.

The road of the imagination contains a surprising amount of concrete images which may be mapped out, as well as the “much unseen” that Walt Whitman spoke about in his epic “Song of the Open Road.” By using the tools of both poetry and yoga, we can transform into road-ready travelers of the imagination. In this experiential workshop, we’ll intersperse movement with writing prompts to help us escape our habitual residence in the intellect, in order to assume a more graceful position in the realm of reflective presence. Both the physical and creative exercises will be designed to help participants map out familiar roads (our individual bodies and minds, for instance, or our shared socio-historical movement), as well as chart out the possibilities that lie ahead. Participants should dress comfortably and bring your favorite notebook and pen and an open attitude.

4:00pm – 5:30pm

Claiming History: Writing Cliophrastic Poems
Marilyn Nelson, Kim Roberts, Dan Vera
Human Rights Campaign, Room 105A [Map]

Clio, the Muse of History, inspires us to revisit, reinterpret, and reclaim. This work is particularly important for people who have been historically oppressed or underrepresented in cultural narratives: women, GLBTQ people, people of color, and those who come from ethnic or religious minority groups. In this roundtable, three writers who have specialized in historical poems as a means to uncover and reclaim will read examples of their work, and discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of writing about American history. We will explore the sometimes conflicting needs of art and fact, and distribute a “recommended reading” list.

Disturbing the Piece: A Dialogue on Activism & Art with Young Splitistas
Jonathan B. Tucker, members of the DC Youth Slam Team
Charles Sumner School, Room 300 [Map]

The Environment in Crisis: Poetry & Activism
Ross Gay, Melissa Tuckey, Anne Waldman, Wang Ping
Wilderness Society Conference Room [Map]

We recently passed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, bringing us close to the number 450, which climate scientists warn we must avoid. Environmental regulations have been rolled back or disappeared. Oil and gas development in the US is ravaging our water systems and air. A former head of Monsanto now runs the FDA. All these problems are connected, none is more urgent than any other, and all are linked to social justice problems. Time for a major paradigm shift! What are poets doing? What can poets do? Panelists will discuss their eco-poetic activism and brainstorm ways to come together as a community around this growing crisis.

Talking Back to the World: Using Poetry and Performance to Speak Out Against Injustice
Nanya-Akuki Goodrich, Ellen Hagan, Renee Watson
Human Rights Campaign, Room 105C [Map]

Touching and Naming the Roots of This Tree: Seeds for Multicultural/Multilingual Narrative Poems
Maria Luisa Arroyo
Charles Sumner School, Room 101 [Map]

As poets with roots here and in other countries or cultures, we must continue to write narrative poems that authentically reflect the complexity of our own identities and journeys, even as we call the United States home. Part of this complexity stems from the need to write narrative poems that code-switch between languages and/ or are written in one’s mother tongue(s). When we do so and when we factor in race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, and identity, we capture more fully the experiences we, our living relatives, and our ancestors have and have had. Please bring an object of personal meaning (a photo, a newspaper clipping, a factory ID, etc.) to you and/or to a family member, living or deceased, as a writing prompt for yourself and others. The workshop leader is a multi-linguist (English, Spanish, German, and conversational Farsi) who invites participants to own your own languages and dialects as you write and read aloud your first drafts.

7:30pm – 9:00pm - FEATURED READING

Joy Harjo, Dunya Mikhail, Danez Smith & DC Youth Slam Team Member Amina Iro

National Geographic, Grosvenor Auditorium
1145 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036  [Map]
Entrance on M Street

10:00pm – 12:00am

OPEN MIC
Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Street, Cullen Room
1025 5th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001 [Map]