Split This Rock 4.11

The organizers of Split This Rock believe that as citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. We call on poets of conscience to move to the center of public life as we forge a visionary new arts movement for peace and justice.

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 unnameable, and speaks directly from the individual and collective conscience is more important than ever.

Split This Rock explores and celebrates 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 first two festivals, March 20-23, 2008, and March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC, featured readings by some of the most beloved poets of our time, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism—unique opportunities to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis.

Our youth programming includes the DC Youth Slam Team, the 2014 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival Champions.