Sad that I am missing the Split This Rock event honoring Eliza Griswold – but YOU can attend!
Next Friday night, I’ll be in New York seeing this play, but if I were in Washington, DC, I would be at the event organized by Split This Rock awarding the inaugural Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism to Eliza Griswold. I’ll put the full press release below about the event to encourage you to attend if you are in the area.
Eliza Griswold Wins Inaugural Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism
Griswold to be recognized for project collecting folk poems from Afghan women at award ceremony November 1, 2013
Split This Rock, the DC-based national organization dedicated to the poetry of provocation and witness, is pleased to announce that Eliza Griswold will receive the first Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism on November 1, 6-9 pm, at the Goethe-Institut, 812 7th Street, NW, Washington, DC. Tickets to the reception and award ceremony are $25 and can be purchased at www.SplitThisRock.org. Made possible by the support of the CrossCurrents Foundation, the award recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. The event is cosponsored by the Goethe-Institut.
The Freedom Plow Award, judged by Martha Collins, Carlos Andrés Gómez, and E. Ethelbert Miller, carries a cash award of $3,500 and is being given for the first time in 2013. The judges were deeply impressed by Eliza Griswold’s project, for which she traveled to Afghanistan and collected two-line folk poems called landays – some ancient, some brand new – from Afghan women. The poems were published in a special issue of Poetry Magazine in June and are forthcoming in book form from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Finalists for the 2013 award are Jorge Argueta, Elana Bell, Tim Z. Hernandez, and Wang Ping.
Eliza Griswold received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her ongoing work on water and poverty in America. Her first non-fiction book, The Tenth Parallel, was awarded the Anthony J. Lukas prize and was a New York Times bestseller. Her poetry and reportage has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, among many others. She’s held fellowships at Harvard University and the New America Foundation. The collection of reportage and translations of Afghan folk poetry, I am the Beggar of the World, will be published in the Spring of 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux with a second collection of her poems to follow.
In 2012 Griswold began traveling to rural Afghanistan with the photographer Seamus Murphy to collect landays, two-line folk poems written and recited by Afghan women. The landays, Murphy’s photos, and Griswold’s writings about the experience have introduced rural Afghan women – an otherwise invisible population, despite the more than 10 years since the US invaded – to American readers and television viewers. Poetry Magazine, in addition to devoting an entire issue to the landays, published Griswold’s long essay on the documentation project, with photos, on their website.
Split This Rock calls poets to the center of public life and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. Its programs integrate poetry into public life and support the poets of all ages who write and perform this essential work. Split This Rock anticipates that the Freedom Plow Award, like its signature biennial poetry festival, will become an essential, enduring part of its mission to promote the growing field of art and social activism on a national level. The award is named for lines from a poem by Langston Hughes:
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
The CrossCurrents Foundation promotes social, environmental, and economic justice, focusing where it believes private funding can make a strategic difference to public education campaigns about critical issues. Effective and socially relevant public art is part of its overall effort to increase civic participation.
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