Word Works Authors at Split This Rock Festival

The Word Works is spreading the word about our authors Sarah Browning and Brandon Johnson who will make the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness another huge success.

Of course, Sarah Browning, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, is the founding director of Split This Rock. She knows how to attract the most socially active poets. Among her featured poets is Marilyn Nelson, who gave a master class workshop for us in 2001 on how to work with and write researched-based poems. Kim Roberts, who is also a featured poet, supported Marilyn's Word Works master class by getting us a great venue to hold that class. Of course, Word Works knows anything Kim does will be worth experiencing. Word Works has sponsored a number of her projects including her book Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word in DC.

Brandon Johnson, author of Love's Skin, is active with Cave Canem, a national organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of black poets. He is a founding member of the Modern Urban Griots, a poetry and performance collective in the District of Columbia. And he is a dynamic reader of his own work.

Testimonials and reviews from the 2010 Festival tell the bigger story.  So make your calendar with these dates March 22-25, 2012 for Split This Rock!

Word Works Authors and Moving Words

Last night, wearing my hat as Moving Words Program Co-ordinator, I attended a reading by the winners of the Arlington, Virginia Cultural Affairs Moving Words contest for adults. The winners were selected by Kim Roberts, who founded the contest in 1999, and Jeneva Stone. The program was held at the Shirlington Busboys and Poets restaurant. There were six winners and two are Word Works authors: Mel Belin (Flesh That Was Chrysalis) and Kathi Morrison-Taylor, a new author in The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection imprint. Other readers were Philip Clark, Katie Kemple, and Madelyn Rosenberg. Absent was Natalie Le Beau. Visit http://www.arlingtonarts.org/cultural_affairs/movingwords.htm to read the winning poems which will be posted as attractive broadsides on Northern Virginia Metrobuses operating in Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax County and Fairfax City.

Other interesting highlights of the evening were that Edith Stone, daughter of Jeneva Stone, made her debut reading (Edith is eight years old) and Philip Clark read poems from an unpublished  anthology that he is developing on poets who perished from A.I.D.S., including poems by Chasen Gaver and Essex Hemphill, poets who read in the early days of the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series.

If you haven't been to an event at the Shirlington Busboys, check out Fred Joiner's weblog. What I loved about last evening is that people of all ages and varying interests in poetry came together to hear the featured Moving Words winners and the open mic readers. Hats off to Norman Thornton for moderating the evening.