The Poetry Foundation works to amplify poetry & celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience & share poetry. Publisher of
@PoetryMagazine
The Poetry Foundation is proud to announce the recipients of the 2024 Pegasus Awards!
Our sincere congratulations go out to Li-Young Lee, Jen Benka, Elizabeth Sarah Coles, and Carole Boston Weatherford! 🎉
Learn more:
We are proud to announce THE SLOWDOWN, a new poetry podcast and radio feature hosted by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith! Learn more and listen on November 26.
🎊 The Poetry Foundation is thrilled to announce the 12 finalists for the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships! Thank you to all of those who shared their work with us! 🎊
Please join us in congratulating the five 2023 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows, Bhion Achimba, Roda Avelar, Ariana Benson, Chrysanthemum, and Willie Lee Kinard III! 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉
The Poetry Foundation is proud to announce Marilyn Nelson is the winner of the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Naomi Shihab Nye is the 2019–21 Young People's Poetry Laureate, and Terrance Hayes is the winner of the 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism! 🎊
The heart
is a skinny
piece of paper.
—Shani, age eleven
What poem would you write on the “skinny/ piece of paper” that is the heart?
#NationalPoetryMonth
📚
Congratulations to Louise Glück on winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature!
Revisit Claire Luchette's interview with Glück on writing process, her 13th book of poems, and why she experiences a ‘kind of grief’ upon publication.
[📷 Katherine Wolkoff]
The Poetry Foundation is proud to announce the 2022 Pegasus Awards winners, including an unprecedented cohort of 11 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners! 🎉🎊
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
—2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Li-Young Lee
The Board of Directors of the Poetry Foundation have accepted the resignation of Foundation President Henry Bienen with gratitude for his years of service; it is effective immediately. In addition, Willard Bunn III is stepping down as Board chair.
🎉 Poetry Month is here! 🎉
With free downloads of
@PoetryMagazine
, hybrid events, and over 46k poems in our archive, there are so many ways to celebrate!
"Plato wanted to banish poets from his Republic because they can make lies seem like truth. Shelley thought poets were 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world,' and Auden insisted that 'poetry makes nothing happen.'" [1/2]
"It’s easy for people to say no to imperfectly rendered plans for the future. But we have to understand that the greatest social transformations in our country came about because people fought for things they had never seen."
—
@eveewing
to
@JulianThePoet
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
—Emily Dickinson, who died
#onthisday
in 1886.
Congratulations to the 2023 Pegasus Awards winners!
🎉 Kimiko Hahn: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
🎉
@ToiDerricotte
& Cornelius Eady (
@roughband
): Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry
🎉Douglas Kearney: Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism
Learn more:
We're seeking several freelance writers to review poetry books and a news curator to aggregate poetry-related news for the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet! Learn more about these independent contractor roles!
#freelance
#publishing
April is
#NationalPoetryMonth
and we have so many ways to celebrate. This month's issue is made up of 3 special folios and we'll be posting questions for you about some of the poems in the issue; those posts will be marked with the 📚 emoji. We can't wait to hear from you!
"There is no such thing as Native American poetry. We are poets who belong to Native Nations. There are more than 573 Native Nations."
—
@HeidErdrich
on the June 2018 Native Poets issue of
@poetrymagazine
.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" was published 200 years ago this month. Learn more about the poem that has intrigued lovers of poetry, film, and comic books alike.
When I am gone what will you do?
Who will write and draw for you?
Someone smarter—someone new?
Someone better—maybe YOU!
–"When I Am Gone" by Shel Silverstein who died
#onthisday
in 1999.
Announcing emergency funding for organizations fighting for social justice, and working to advance racial equity in poetry and affiliated art. Apply now:
The CDC Poetry Initiative is calling for poets to submit work that incorporates all seven of the words that the Department of Health and Human Services banned the CDC from using. Prepare your most vulnerable, evidence-based work!
We are proud to announce the finalists for this year’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowships. The winners will be announced in September, and we encourage you to get to know all of the finalists’ work in the meantime!
Congratulations to
@poetrymagazine
contributor Frank Bidart, who is the winner of the 2018
#PulitzerPrize
for poetry! Get to know his work with this podcast from the archives.
The Poetry Foundation is proud to announce Marilyn Chin (
@poetmarilynchin
) as the winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and Saskia Hamilton as the winner of the 2020 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism! 🎉 🎉
[📷 Jon Medel]
We recognize these are unprecedented times for education, and so we started compiling resources for teaching and learning remotely, for all levels. Please explore, share and send us your ideas.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
��Read Emily Dickinson from our series “Together and by Ourselves”
#PoemoftheDay
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
–From "The Colossus" by Sylvia Plath, who died
#onthisday
in 1963. [📷 by Bettmann]
"You could give a speech, you could give a eulogy, you could critique, but sometimes just having a moment of silence is profound."
—
@eveewing
in her interview with
@JulianThePoet
. [Photo by Daniel Barlow]
I realized that by devaluing humor, by striving to be a “serious writer,” a deadly serious person, I wasn’t taking myself seriously.
—Chen Chen (
@chenchenwrites
) for the
#Harriet
blog.
We’re thrilled to announce new members of the
@poetrymagazine
team! 🎉
Please join us in welcoming Cindy Juyoung Ok as host of the Poetry Magazine Podcast and five new magazine readers!
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
—Lewis Carroll, who was born
#onthisday
in 1832.
Today is
#InternationalWomensDay
, and we will be posting eight items over the course of the day to celebrate. We begin with a poem by Lucille Clifton from our
#WomensHistoryMonth
collection.
Congratulations to Jericho Brown (
@jerichobrown
), Toi Derricotte (
@ToiDerricotte
), Ilya Kaminsky (
@ilya_poet
), Carmen Giménez Smith (
@lizitasmith
) and Arthur Sze on being named finalists for the National Book Award in Poetry!
The Poetry Foundation and POETRY magazine stand in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism.
Read our full statement here:
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
–Maya Angelou, who died
#onthisday
in 2014:
Poems can expose grim truths, raise consciousness, and build united fronts. Explore our updated collection "Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment."
Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know. Behold, instead, a woman who baked a lot; who was very often funny; and who used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family.
—
@MayaCPopa
on the letters of Emily Dickinson
I thought: If T.S. Eliot can add those Western languages, why shouldn't I add lines of Japanese and East Asian literature? Why shouldn't I include my cultural references?
—Kimiko Hahn, winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
—Audre Lorde from "A Woman Speaks," featured in our Women's History Month collection.
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake.
—N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024)