New York City, August 5, 2004--The Academy of American Poets announced today that it has designated 31 sites as National Poetry Landmarks. "Road Trip! Poetry Landmarks across the U.S.A." will be showcased on the Academy's website, www.poets.org, during August 2004, as part of the Academy's year-long National Poetry Almanac project.

"We received hundreds of poetry landmark nominations, and we heard from people in all fifty states," says the Academy's executive director Tree Swenson. "We are excited to recognize points on our country's physical landscape-from Maine to Georgia to Montana-that are important to the cultural landscape."

Sites chosen as landmarks include poets' birthplaces (e.g., Carl Sandburg, Galesburg, IL), poetry museums and libraries (e.g., the Marianne Moore Collection at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA), places of poetic inspiration (e.g., Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn, NY), and sites that commemorate poetry (e.g., Berkeley Poetry Walk, Berkeley, CA). "We tried to identify places where people can literally walk in a poet's footsteps," says Swenson. The nomination process was open to the public. A list of the sites selected as National Poetry Landmarks follows this announcement.

The Academy began rolling out the National Poetry Almanac on April 1, 2004, to coincide with the first day of National Poetry Month, a program started by the Academy in 1996. The Almanac will ultimately provide 365 days' worth of poetry highlights, activities, ideas, and history for individual exploration and classroom use. The Almanac complements the National Poetry Map, another online project created by the Academy in 2003. Both the Almanac and Map are available exclusively at the Academy's award-winning website, www.poets.org.

The Academy of American Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1934 to foster appreciation for contemporary poetry and to support American poets at all stages of their careers. For more information on the Academy and its programs, visit www.poets.org.

 

National Poetry Landmarks
from the National Poetry Almanac, a project of the Academy of American Poets

1. Berkley Poetry Walk, Berkeley, CA
2. City Lights Book Shop, San Francisco, CA
3. Robinson Jeffers Tor House, Carmel, CA
4. Wallace Stevens's hometown, Hartford, CT
5. Homes of Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Tennessee Williams, & Shel Silverstein, Key West, FL
6. Sidney Lanier Cottage, Macon, GA
7. Carl Sandberg Cottage, Galesburg, IL
8. Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, Chicago, IL
9. Langston Hughes's hometown, Lawrence, KS
10. Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum, Guthrie, KY
11. Emily Dickinson's home, Amherst, MA
12. The Search for Anne Bradstreet, Essex County, MA
13. Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge, MA
14. George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
15. The Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA
16. McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA
17. Edna St. Vincent Millay's home, Camden, ME
18. Theodore Roethke's house, Saginaw, MI
19. Robert Hayden's bus route, Ann Arbor, MI
20. Dixon Bar, Dixon, MT
21. The Frost Place, Franconia, NH
22. Walt Whitman House, Camden, NJ
23. William Carlos Williams's hometown, Rutherford, NJ
24. George Moses Horton's home, Chatham County, NC
25. American Poets' Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York, NY
26. Brooklyn Bridge, New York, NY
27. White Horse Tavern, New York, NY
28. Paul Laurence Dunbar House, Dayton, OH
29. James Wright's hometown, Martins Ferry, OH
30. The California Gulch Trail, La Grande, OR 31. Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, PA