The Poetry Foundation is a United States literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly.[1]
The Poetry Foundation is a non-profit, charitable, 501(c)(3) organization.[4]
History
The foundation is the successor to the Modern Poetry Association (previous publisher of Poetry magazine), which was founded in 1941.[2] The magazine, itself, was established in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Monroe was its first publisher and editor until her death in 1936. The Poetry Foundation is one of the largest literary foundations in the world.[2]
Poetry Foundation Library and courtyard
In 2003, Poetry magazine received a bequest from the estate of Ruth Lilly originally said to be worth over $100 million, but which grew to be about $200 million when it was given out.[5]
The magazine learned in 2001 that it would be receiving the bequest. Before announcing the gift, the magazine waited a year and reconfigured its governing board, which had been concerned with fundraising. The foundation was created, and Joseph Parisi, who had been editor of the magazine for two decades, volunteered to head the new organization. Christian Wiman succeeded to the editorship in 2003. Parisi resigned from the foundation after a few months.[5]
The new board used a recruiting agency to find John Barr, a former executive and published poet, to head the foundation.[5]Robert Polito, the poet and critic who founded and directed the graduate writing program at the New School, succeeded Barr in 2013 and served until 2015. In December, 2015, Henry S. Bienen, President Emeritus of Northwestern University was named president.[6][7] Bienen served as the president of the Poetry Foundation from December 2015 until his resignation on June 10, 2020, following criticism of the foundation's support for marginalized artists. In April 2021, the foundation named former Chicago commissioner for cultural affairs, Michelle T. Boone, as its new president.[8]
Poetry Foundation building
Part of the Lilly bequest was used to build the Poetry Foundation's building in Near North Side, Chicago. The building, designed by John Ronan, opened in 2011. It houses a poetry library, reading spaces, and free events, all open to the public, and provides office and editorial space for the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine staff.[9]
Programs
Grants
In 2022, the Poetry Foundation instituted a new grants program with an initial commitment of $9 million over the first three years. The grants program is part of the Foundation's commitment to more robustly support the field of poetry and the literary arts in ways that are both more equitable and transparent.
Events
The Poetry Foundation hosts a schedule of poetry events that are open to the public, free of charge, and often available in-person and via livestream. Events include poetry readings, writing workshops artist collaborations, and exhibitions.
Library
The 30,000-volume library presents a wide selection of modern and contemporary poetry in English or translation. It includes original author works and rare volumes. It also includes representative samples of earlier eras, and includes a 3000-volume children's section. In addition to the reading room, there are listening booths for poet audio recordings and broadcasts related to poetry and interactive displays. It is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday.
Poetry Out Loud Competition
The Poetry Out Loud recitation competition was created in 2006 by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to increase awareness of poetry through performance and competition. It engages high school students in public speaking and the literature and performance of poetry. Poetry Out Loud offers more than $105,000 in prizes and school stipends each year.
Awards
The foundation's awards seek to promote and bring recognition to poets and poetry. The Pegasus Awards are a series of awards to poets and poetic forms (the winged horse, Pegasus, was used to illustrate the early magazine covers, and is part of the foundation and magazine’s branding). They are generally given annually. The Young People's Poet Laureate (formerly the Children's Poet Laureate) is a two-year appointment to an author of children's poetry. The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is an annual award given for lifetime achievement in poetry to U.S. poets. The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism is an annual award that seeks to honor an outstanding book-length work of criticism published in the U.S. in the prior calendar year. The Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, which was established in 2023, is bestowed in recognition of commitment and extraordinary work in poetry and the literary arts through administration, advocacy, education, publishing, or service. The Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships are awarded to five aspiring U.S. poets to support study and writing. The Emily Dickinson First Book Award was an award that recognized an American poet, not under the age of 40, who had not yet published a poetry collection in book form; Kristen Tracy won the 2017 award, consisting of $10,000 and publication and promotion of her collection Half-Hazard by Graywolf Press.
Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute provides an independent forum to convene discussions about poetry. Poets, scholars, educators and others are invited to share ideas about the intellectual and practical needs of the poetry form, and to generate solutions to benefit the art.
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which she established in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.
Poetry has been published in Chicago since 1912. It is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Founded by Harriet Monroe, it is now published by the Poetry Foundation. In 2007 the magazine had a circulation of 30,000, and printed 300 poems per year out of approximately 100,000 submissions. It is sometimes referred to as Poetry—Chicago.
Henry Samuel Bienen is an American academic and administrator. He was named President of the Poetry Foundation in 2015, and is President Emeritus of Northwestern University, where he served from 1995 to 2009.
Martín Espada is a Puerto Rican-American poet, and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreach activities such as National Poetry Month, its website Poets.org, the syndicated series Poem-a-Day, American Poets magazine, readings and events, and poetry resources for K-12 educators. In addition, it sponsors a portfolio of nine major poetry awards, of which the first was a fellowship created in 1946 to support a poet and honor "distinguished achievement," and more than 200 prizes for student poets.
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a professor of writing.
The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is awarded annually by The Poetry Foundation, which also publishes Poetry magazine. The prize was established in 1986 by Ruth Lilly. It honors a living U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition"; its value is $100,000 making it one of the richest literary prizes in the world. The prize has been called "among the most prestigious awards that can be won by an American poet".
The University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson, Arizona, is among the most extensive collections of contemporary poetry in the United States. It is the largest such collection which is "open shelf."
Ruth Lilly was an American philanthropist, the last surviving great-grandchild of Eli Lilly, founder of the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical firm, and heir to the Lilly family fortune. A lifelong resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, Ruth Lilly is estimated to have given away nearly $800 million of her inheritance during her lifetime, mostly in support of the arts, education, health, and environmental causes in Indianapolis and in Indiana.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is an American independent, non-profit literary publishing company located in Rochester, New York, founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor and translator, A. Poulin, Jr., and publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Angela Jackson is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University. Jackson has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.
Douglas Kearney is an American poet, performer and librettist. Kearney grew up in Altadena, California. His work has appeared in Nocturnes, Jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Scapegoat, Obsidian, Boundary 2, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, and Indiana Review.In 2012, his and Anne LeBaron's opera, Crescent City, premiered and received widespread praise. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota.
Theodore Zachary Cotler is an American filmmaker, poet, and novelist. His first film, Maya Dardel, premiered in the Narrative Competition at the 2017 South by Southwest Film Festival and was acquired by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Orion Pictures. His second film, The Wall of Mexico, premiered at South by Southwest in 2019. A third film, When I'm a Moth, came out shortly after the second. He won the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize for Sonnets to the Humans and the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry for Supplice. In 2011, the Poetry Foundation awarded him the Ruth Lilly Fellowship.
Danez Smith is a poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards. Their most recent poetry collection Homie was published on January 21, 2020.
Solmaz Sharif is an Iranian-American poet. Her debut poetry collection, Look, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley.
The Adroit Journal is an American literary magazine founded in November 2010. Published five times per year by founding editor Peter LaBerge, The Adroit Journal is currently based in Philadelphia. The journal was produced with the support of the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House from 2013 to 2017 and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City from 2017-2019 and 2020-2023 respectively.
Javier Zamora is a Salvadoran poet and activist.
Wayne Joshua Miller is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor.
Angel Nafis is an American poet and spoken word artist. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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