Split this Rock and Kay Ulanday Barrett are back to host another spectacular virtual poetry reading! Join us for Resist & Revel: An Asian & Pacific Islander Poetry Celebration, featuring:
Isa Borgeson
Noah Arhm Choi
S. J. Ghaus
Aliah Lavonne Jahan-Tigh
Noʻu Revilla
Lehua M. Taitano
Tickets: Offered on a sliding scale and start at $5
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility is a core value for Split this Rock. We strive to provide programs, materials, and communications that allow people within the disability community to engage fully. On-screen ASL interpretation, Zoom auto-captions, and a document formatted for screen readers with poet bios and poem text will be provided.
Let us know of any accessibility questions or accommodation requests when purchasing tickets or by emailing [email protected] with “ACCESS REQUEST” in the subject line by Thursday, May 14. Given our ongoing funding challenges, we cannot promise accessibility services, but will do our best to provide accommodations.
ABOUT THE HOST & CURATOR
KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, and cultural strategist. They are the 2026 Artist-in-Residence for Disability Poetics & Community Activism for the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis. They are a 2024–25 Disabled Futures Fellow, awarded by The Ford Foundation and United States Artists. They are a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. They have attended residences at Tin House, Millay Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, Lambda Literary, and Macondo. Barrett was a James Baldwin Fellow at MacDowell. Their work has been published by the New York Times, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Vogue, Brevity, and more. Their book “More than Organs” (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) is a Stonewall Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
ABOUT THE POETS
ALIAH LAVONNE JAHAN-TIGH is an Iranian American author, teacher, and artist. Their work studies both infrastructures of power and ecological connection. The author of “Weren’t We Natural Swimmers” (Tram Editions, 2022), their poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Mizna, Split this Rock’s Poem of the Week, Guernica, Gulf Coast Journal, Matter Monthly, The Rupture, and other journals. Jahan-Tigh was a finalist for the 2025 Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship. Their work has also been supported by the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Tin House Summer Workshop, The Brooklyn Rail, and other organizations. Jahan-Tigh lives and works in Houston, Texas.
ISA BORGESON is a queer, mixed race, Filipino American poet and community organizer from Oakland. In 2020, Isa was named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow by the Poetry Foundation. They have also received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Art (VONA) Foundation, Crescendo Literary’s Poetry Incubator, AIR Serenbe, and Mesa Refuge. Borgeson’s poetry is influenced by her years organizing in the aftermath of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. They aim to use storytelling to document resistance across their homelands, from Oakland to Tanauan.
NOAH ARHM CHOI is the author of “Cut to Bloom” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2019 Jack McCarthy Prize. A Lambda Literary Poet-In-Residence and Valentines Editor for Honey Literary, their work appears in The Adroit Journal, Split this Rock, The Rumpus, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Choi was short-listed for the Poetry International Prize and received the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. They serve on the Kundiman Board of Trustees and currently work at NYU Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. A K–12 educator for fifteen years, they work to embolden the intersection of education, activism, and the arts.
S. J. GHAUS is a Pakistani poet, artist, and organizer. They draw on years of community organizing to dream into decolonial pasts, presents, and futures through their poetry and visual art, which you can find at Pleiades, Ecotone, and other outlets and galleries across the United States. Their work has been supported by the Academy of American Poets, Tin House, VONA, and most recently the Tamaas Translation Seminar. An award-winning teacher, Ghaus is committed to bringing poetry to the people—aunties in apartment complexes, communities reeling from police violence, youth organizing against colonialism. They believe in art as a pathway to an abolitionist, borderless world where justice blooms from every river to every sea.
NOʻU REVILLA is a Hawaiian poet, educator, and lifetime “slyly / reproductive” student of Native Hawaiian activist and poet Haunani-Kay Trask. With aloha ʻāina in her veins, Revilla joins the global demand that all oppressed and occupied peoples, from Palestine to West Papua to Kanaky to Hawaiʻi, be free. May we never stop reaching for each other.
LEHUA M. TAITANO, familian Kabesa yan Kuetu, is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and cofounder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry: “Inside Me an Island” (Wordtech Communications, 2018) and “A Bell Made of Stones” (Tinfish Press, 2013). Her chapbook, “appalachiapacific,” won the Merriam-Frontier Award for Short Fiction. She has two chapbooks of poetry and visual art: “Sonoma” and “Capacity.” Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
ABOUT SPLIT THIS ROCK
Split this Rock is a national organization with a mission to integrate poetry and social justice. We materially support poets who are often excluded and underrepresented in the literary landscape, particularly those who are BIPOC, LGBTQ, disabled or chronically ill, and/or working class. With strong commitments to racial, gender, economic, and disability justice, we work to expand the horizons of inclusion and assert the transformative power of language to bear witness to injustice and provoke social change. We believe poetry acts as an agent for change by revealing the diversity and complexity of human experience, reflecting on daily lives and struggles, considering personal and social responsibility, and envisioning a better world. Learn more at Split this Rock’s website.