JOIN US at Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Poems of Provocation & Witness: March 10-13, 2010

Warriors Writing: Teaching Creative Writing to War Veterans

Friday, March 12 from 9:30 AM -11 AM

Thurgood Marshall Center-1

With Lovella Calica, Cathy Che, George Kovach, and Laren McClung

This panel will focus on teaching creative writing to veterans, fostering a safe and open workshop setting, creating communities, suggestions for pedagogy, resources, and addressing relevant issues such as PTS, otherness, catharsis, and witness. The panel will also focus on how to begin a new program in your community. Panelists have taught with organizations such as Warrior Writers, the Iraq Veterans Writing Program at NYU, and the Vet Center in Brockton, Massachusetts.

About Split This Rock:

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 unnamable, and speaks directly from the individual and collective conscience is more important than ever. The festival will explore and celebrate 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.

Faced with war in Iraq and elsewhere, our country faces a crisis of imagination. Most Americans agree that we need dramatic change: to end the war, reorder our national priorities to meet human needs, save our planet. How we address these challenges is a question not just for policy makers and strategists. It is a question for all of us. We believe that poets have a unique role to play in social movements as innovators, visionaries, truth tellers, and restorers of language.

Check out the website: www.splitthisrock.org