The Academy of American Poets, the nation’s largest member-supported poetry organization, is pleased to announce a grant from the Amazon Literary Partnership to support Poem-a-Day. Launched in 2006, Poem-a-Day is the only digital series presenting previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets.
Each morning, Poem-a-Day reaches over 400,000 readers through various distribution channels, introducing poets to an audience many times larger than most other poetry journals. Poem-a-Day is also available for free to news organizations, further broadening its reach.
Because the series is continuous and ongoing, it allows the Academy of American Poets to feature work that responds to the experience of modern life and current events. Sometimes the work we publish in Poem-a-Day transcends the individual reader and becomes something that unites a community of readers in feeling. In January 2016, for example, Poem-a-Day featured the “Letter Beginning With Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz” by Matthew Olzmann. The poem, about school shooting and gun violence, struck a nerve. Olzmann writes: “The classroom of grief / had far more seats / than the classroom for math.” The poem quickly became our most shared Poem-a-Day to date.“Amazon Literary Partnership’s generous contribution is vital to the continuation of Poem-a-Day, which in turn supports hundreds of living poets by giving them a vast readership and likewise supports thousands of readers, giving them free access to the best of contemporary poetry today,” said Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets.