With this week marking the start of the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world, the Academy of American Poets is experiencing the highest engagement with its K–12 Education Program in its history, with tens of thousands of educators across the U.S. accessing free poetry resources offered by the organization each week.
Teach This Poem—the Academy’s award-winning weekly resource that features a timely poem, a primary source from the Library of Congress, a lesson plan, and related resources—now has close to 40,000 subscribers, with an increase of more than 5,000 teachers in the last twelve months.
From February 1, 2020 to February 1, 2021, the Teach This Poem landing page on Poets.org had nearly 243,000 page views over 153,700 in the same date range the previous year, which is a 58.08% increase, with the majority of the growth beginning in March 2020, which the Academy attributes to the pandemic and a pivot to remote learning, and then again at the end of January, which the Academy attributes to Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural reading. The lesson plan on Poets.org featuring Gorman’s poem was visited 6,829 times in 2021 compared to 549 last year, which is an increase of 1,143.90%.