If you’re anywhere near D.C. this coming weekend, you need to get over to the Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum, headquarters for Split This Rock’s festival of socially engaged writing. Featured poets include Franny Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Shailja Patel, Wang Ping, Claudia Rankine, Tim Seibles, Anne Waldman.

Hrag Vartanian corrals the week’s must-read links in a nifty column in Hyperallergic Weekend, Required Reading.

Gizmodo details the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU’s court briefs, and how LAPD won’t turn over its vast data collection of license plates on the basis that every single car in LA is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Think the racial and gender aspects of Battlestar Gallactica characters have anything to do with un-transcribed verse of Emily Dickinson? Fire up another pot of coffee–you may need it for this bracing ride–and check out Kazim Ali’s essay in The American Poetry Review, Write Something on My Wall: Body, Identity and Poetry.

Snow coming in again for some of us–still, you have to admit, the cold is starting to feel like spring cold.

With love,
sammy