Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Split This Rock
Split This Rock serves as a home for socially engaged poets.
Split This Rock program participant reading at a public action in Washington, DC. Photo by Kristen Adair, courtesy of Split This Rock.
Mission: Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. It calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. Building the audience for poetry of provocation and witness from our home in the nation’s capital, we celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination.
Borrowing “split this rock” from “Big Buddy,” a poem by Langston Hughes, the March 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness celebrated poetry and its power to serve as an agent of change. The Festival united hundreds of poets, activists, and cultural workers from Washington, DC, and across the United States. Its success illuminated the need for programming that honors and cultivates poetry dedicated to social justice, inspiring the Festival founders to establish Split This Rock in Washington, DC, to serve as a home for socially engaged poets.
Split This Rock operates on the belief that poetry is a change agent that reveals the diversity and complexity of human experience, reflects on daily lives and struggles, considers personal and social responsibility, and envisions a better world. The organization supports, uplifts, and celebrates those who have been left out of the poetry field and its possibilities—not only the material pathways to earning sustainable livelihoods as poets, but also the poetic record of social and political conditions and the collective imagination of a liberated future.
In service to this commitment, Split this Rock intentionally works with poets who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+, disabled or chronically ill, and/or working class. Among the poets published from 2023 to 2025, 91% identified as people of color, 58% as LGBTQ+, and 31% as disabled, and all contractors have identified as members of these communities. Thanks to its commitment to representation, Split This Rock's programs connect to audiences of diverse backgrounds.
Poet Kazim Ali reading at a Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Photo by Kristen Adair, courtesy of Split This Rock.
Split This Rock’s workshops, readings, and roundtables are offered virtually or in person. The Poetry Writing Capsule Series of instructive videos features one poet of color presenting a topic, discussing poems, and sharing writing prompts. These self-paced poetry explorations are often used by community writing groups and in classrooms. Virtual writing workshops have explored using poetic forms to preserve cultural memory and assert belonging, and writing and revising poetry toward self-empowerment and collective liberation.
Youth workshops occur throughout the year and are often hosted in partnership with DC-area Poetry Foundation grantee-partners. American Poetry Museum collaborations included the “Celebrating Neurodiversity” Youth Writing Workshops and Professional Development Series and the open mic “If All the Trees Were Pens” hosted by Sasa Aakil, an alumnus of Split This Rock’s Youth Programs.
Split This Rock has also collaborated with DC publisher, Shout Mouse Press. The first collaboration invited local LGBTQ+ youth to participate in a series of paid writing workshops and submit works for potential inclusion in a queer youth poetry anthology, The Light Looks Like Me. The Youth Activist Poetry Project collaboration offered DC-area youth a paid, six-week summer program of political education and writing workshops focused on social justice topics driven by their interests. Split This Rock teaching artists facilitated the workshops, and guest speakers provided political education sessions. Participants wrote original poetry to be compiled in the Youth Activist Poetry Anthology published by Shout Mouse Press.
Additional publication efforts include the Poem of the Week series, which delivers a poem, audio recording, and selection of similar poems to more than 6,000 email subscribers 48 Fridays a year. Poems from the series are also shared on the organization’s social media accounts. A team of four paid first readers helps curate the poems, and poets published are compensated for their work. Each year, Split This Rock nominates up to six poems from Poem of the Week for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes.
Poem of the Week poems are archived in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which serves as the only resource of its kind. This free, accessible, online poetry database is searchable by social justice theme or topic, poet identity, and several other search tags, which can be combined to create a unique, specific search. Users say it’s an invaluable resource for discovering the work of different poets, enhancing the breadth of poetry to which they’re exposed, and curating poems for use in reading groups, classrooms, special events, and other endeavors.
Split This Rock is committed to providing offerings that are accessible to people in the disability community and those whose financial circumstances present barriers to access. Virtual and in-person programs are typically provided at no cost to participants. When there is a cost for registration, rates are low, and offer a sliding scale and scholarship opportunities. Split This Rock contracts with disabled-led consulting firms, access services firms, and disabled poets to audit program offerings.
Split This Rock also conducts a thorough content review process to ensure that language used in programs does not perpetuate harm. If staff or contractors feel that a word or phrase could be interpreted as upholding forms of oppression, poets are asked if they are open to receiving feedback, and a consensual conversation unfolds. The organization also provides guidelines to poets to conduct their own content review in an effort to engage a broader community in this process.
The Sustainable Futures Grant provides Split This Rock multi-year general operating support, which helps cover the cost of staff salaries, accessibility services, and digital infrastructure. This funding allows Split This Rock to develop and implement annual plans with greater certainty and confidence, while sustaining urgent work at a time of escalating political attacks on the communities it serves and diminished funding for the art it amplifies.
Split This Rock is a Poetry Foundation 2025-2028 Sustainable Futures grantee-partner.
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