Academy of American Poets, Inc.

We have three primary goals: to support poets; to encourage the appreciation and reading of American poetry past and present; and to assist teachers in incorporating poetry into their lessons and introducing poetry to their students.

To achieve our goals we award funds to poets through our prize program, and we publish and promote poets on Poets.org, in Poem-a-Day, in American Poets magazine, and at live events and on our social media channels. To encourage the appreciation and reading of American poetry, we make more than 10,000 poems available to more than 30 million readers on Poets.org, we distribute poems every morning to more than 200,000 email subscribers through Poem-a-Day. And, we organize National Poetry Month and Poem in Your Pocket Day, which reach another 10 million individuals. To assist teachers, we produce a weekly Teach This Poem series that serves a growing audience of more than 30,000 K-12 educators. We also make lesson plans and other resources for teachers available on Poets.org.

Almost all of the prizes we offer poets are endowed and so will exist in perpetuity. The majority of our publications and other promotion of poets is in the digital space, making this work efficient and cost-effective. To assist in our producing excellent educator resources we added an Educator in Residence. The majority of staff members have MFA degrees in poetry and we also benefit from the guidance of a Board of Chancellors, which is composed of fifteen esteemed poets. Finally, we have an active Board of Directors who provide oversight, and assist in raising funds.

In the past year we re-launched Poets.org, surpassed 200,000 subscribers to Poem-a-Day, received the Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation for Teach This Poem, and raised $1.2 million to support poets laureate at the state and local level. On our horizon is continuing to help build the Poetry Coalition, an alliance of more than 20 nonprofit organizations in the U.S. dedicated to poetry. And, exploring brand extensions of Poem-a-Day.