New York, NY (March 22, 2021)— Award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye has selected twenty-one new poems by contemporary poets to be featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series as a special offering this April, which is National Poetry Month.
“Being editor of Poem-a-Day during National Poetry Month is better than a lifetime dream come true. It's been my continual joy to share poems with other people—hopefully, poems that might move or transport them—so doing it with this wide audience, at this moment in history, feels especially touching. Poetry respects and uplifts. Poetry tends to the small and necessary elements of experience and observation that might have gone unnoticed. I’m thankful to our selected poets for letting us share their work,” said Shihab Nye.
Among the poets selected by Shihab Nye to be featured in April are Pushcart Prize-winning poet and Guggenheim Fellow Cyrus Cassells, former Poet Laureate of Oregon Kim Stafford, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee Loretta Diane Walker, Arab American Book Award winner Nathalie Handal, and Mosab Abu Toha, founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, plus other acclaimed poets writing today.
To receive Poem-a-Day, which is free and distributed daily to 500,000+ readers via email, social media, and the web, readers can sign up here: www.poets.org/poem-a-day
Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and educator who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live. She is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020). Her other books of poetry include The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998. Nye’s honors include awards from the International Poetry Forum and the Texas Institute of Letters, the Charity Randall Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010 and concluded her six years of active service in 2015. She is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
About the Academy of American Poets
Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states. The organization annually awards more funds to individual poets than any other organization through its prize program, giving a total of $1.25 million to more than 200 poets at various stages of their careers. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides award-winning resources to K–12 educators, including the Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition, working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture.