Join Split This Rock on Thursday, May 25, 6:30-8 pm EDT for a virtual roundtable! Poets Destiny Hemphill, Ching-In Chen, Faylita Hicks, and Moncho Alvarado will discuss poetry and grief, including poetry’s potential to hold and heed our grief as we work towards social change.
The roundtable discussion will be live-streamed through Split This Rock’s YouTube channel. We invite you to share this gathering with friends, family, writing groups, support networks, and community, and to organize COVID-safe watch parties and gatherings. We look forward to gathering with you on Thursday, May 25!
Accessibility: ASL interpretation, CART service, visual descriptions, content notices, and a document formatted for screen readers with materials will be available. To request other accommodations, please send an email to [email protected]. Emails received by Friday, May 12, will give us our best opportunity to fulfill requests. After the conversation is live-streamed, a captioned recording with the ASL interpreter on screen will be prepared and available via YouTube.
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Split This Rock is proud to be a member of The Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of nearly 30 independent poetry organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Poetry Coalition programming is made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation which were secured by the Academy of American Poets.
From March through May 2023, the Poetry Coalition will explore the theme “and so much lost you’d think / beauty had left a lesson: Poetry & Grief” in a series of virtual and in-person programs that will reach more than 300,000 individuals nationwide. The line “and so much lost you’d think / beauty had left a lesson” is from Ed Roberson's poem "once the magnolia has blossomed."
Poetry Coalition members aim to demonstrate how poetry can invite and inspire conversations in their communities about grief—an expansive and rich topic that has become imbued with deeper meaning over the last few years. All organizations and others interested are invited to create programs on this theme in 2023 and to share their efforts using the hashtags #PoetryAndGrief and #PoetryCoalition.