June 23, 2017 (New York, NY)—The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Poets.org has been named a 2017 Best Website for Teaching & Learning by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association.
According to the AASL, sites named as Best Websites for Teaching & Learning "foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration. They offer tools and resources in the categories of media sharing, digital storytelling, managing and organizing, social networking and communications, curriculum collaboration and content resources."
Poets.org is being recognized as a content resource that offers exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning as embodied in the AASL learning standards.
The education materials that we make available on Poets.org are part of our 50+ year tradition of supporting teachers and today include: over 100 lesson plans and other classroom activities; 7,000+ poems and 2,500+ poet bios on the site for reference; Teach This Poem, a weekly package that includes a poem alongside classroom activities and multimedia resources; Dear Poet, an interactive project that invites students write letter to poets; and essays about teaching poetry. We also provide a monthly Educator Newsletter with additional resources and news.
All education materials are vetted by our Educator in Residence, Dr. Madeleine Holzer. Dr. Holzer has a long record of incorporating arts education across academic disciplines. For more than a decade, she served as educational development director and program development director at Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, where she was responsible for education programs K-12 and teacher education collaborations in the New York City Metropolitan area. Dr. Holzer taught for many years prior, both at the high school and university levels, and now serves as a visiting scholar at Lesley University, where she initiates and supports research in teaching, learning, and assessments of creativity.
Our education program also benefits from Education Ambassador Richard Blanco, the fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history. Blanco champions and disseminates information about our K-12 resources, speaks at education conferences, and meets with teachers and education leaders across the United States on the Academy’s behalf.
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About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. The organization produces Poets.org, one of the world’s most popular websites for poets and poetry; National Poetry Month; the widely read Poem-a-Day series; American Poets magazine; resources for K-12 educators; an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and awards the American Poets Prizes.
The Academy of American Poets is part of a national poetry coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.