Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month reminds the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and, of course, poets, marking poetry's important place in our lives.
There are plenty of ways to enjoy and engage with poetry from now till April 30th! Head over to poets.org to subscribe to Poem-a-Day to get a new poem sent to your email inbox daily and to learn more about National Poetry Month events and programming on a national level. Feeling inspired to write your own poetry? National Poetry Writing Month is a yearly event where participants take on the challenge of writing a poem a day for the entire month of April.
Poetry Unbound - 50 Poems to Open Your World by
In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama's appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother's body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn't know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
Red Hot Salsa by
Red Hot Salsa is an extraordinary collection of bilingual poems from the bestselling editor of Cool Salsa i think in spanish i write in english i want to go back to puerto rico, but i wonder if my kink could live in ponce, mayagüez and carolina tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in español --from "My Graduation Speech," by Tato Laviera Ten years after the publication of the acclaimed Cool Salsa, editor Lori Marie Carlson has brought together a stunning variety of Latino poets for a long-awaited follow-up. Established and familiar names are joined by many new young voices, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos has written the Introduction. The poets collected here illuminate the difficulty of straddling cultures, languages, and identities. They celebrate food, family, love, and triumph. In English, Spanish, and poetic jumbles of both, they tell us who they are, where they are, and what their hopes are for the future.
The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body by
National Book Award finalist Alberto Ríos explains the world not through reason but magic. These poems--set in a town that straddles Mexico and Arizona--are lyric adventures, crossing two and three boundaries as easily as one, between cultures, between languages, between senses. Drawing upon fable, parable, and family legend, Ríos utilizes the intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts: plastic lemons turning into baseballs, a grandmother's long hair reaching up to save her life, the painted faith jumpers leaping to the earth and crowd below. This is magical realism at its shimmering best. "Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie and magical perception, and of the threshold between this world and the world just beyond. With humor, compassion, and intelligence, Ríos's poems overlay a child's observation and imagination onto our society of daily inequity, poverty, and violence. The light of memory shines on culture, language, family, neighbors, and friends saving them all in stories that become legends, a light so sensual and full it is 'swallowed into the mouth of the eye, / into the throat of the people.'"--National Book Award Judges' comments "Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie... Whether talking about the smell of food, the essence of a crow or a bear's character or of hard-won human wisdom, Ríos writes in a serenely clear manner that enhances the drama in the quick scenes he summons up."--The New York Times Book Review "... Rios's verse inhabits a country of his own making, sometimes political, often personal, with the familiarity and pungency of an Arizona chili."--The Christian Science Monitor "Alberto Ríos is the man you want to sit next to when it is time to hear a story."--Southwest BookViews "In The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, Alberto Ríos doesn't borrow a myth. Rather, he finds the myth underlying his own life--myth that translates effectively because it is not confined by language. The images of Ríos' life are so vivid, it is as if he has written a picture book that anyone can understand."--The Home & News Tribune "In his new book of poems, Alberto Ríos has given us evidence and motive for celebration. Ríos' poems follow a path of wonder and gently move us to emotional truths that grab our breath and link our inner and outer landscapes. His alchemy works a transformation in the inner vision, turning us toward the deeper mystery of life itself."--American Book Review Alberto Ríos teaches at Arizona State and is the author of eight books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir about growing up on the Mexican border. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is included in over 175 national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.
Paper Dance by
A definitive anthology of the best United States Latino and Latina poets from diverse origins in the Latin world: Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Puerto Rico: Julia Alvarez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Juan Felipe Herrera, Pat Mora,Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Luis J. Rodrguez, and Tino Villeanueva, aswell as emerging writers, including Sandra M. Castillo, Adrian Castro,Silvia Curbelo, Diana Rivera, and Gina Valdez.
Touching the Fire by
As we approach the new century, Latino poetry is in the midst of its most vital and productive period. Poetry by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans has changed the course of contemporary American writing forever.And it has done this by emphasizing poetry as the sound of everyday life--showing readers and other writers that the most effective manner of preserving the traditions of a culture comes from the colorful language of daily experience. Touching the Fire recognizes the excitement of this movement by focusing on a few of its major poets, presenting a substantial portion of each poet's work.Some of these poets--Martin Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Victor Hernandez Vruz, for example--have been writing and publishing a long time.Some are only starting their careers.But they were all chosen because they best represent the strongest elements of modern Latino poetry--a confidence of language in its many forms, a gift for shattering emotional honesty, and an ear for the rhythms of a vibrant culture. Featuring the poetry of- Sandra M. Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Judith Ortiz Cofer Victor Hernandez Cruz Silvia Curbelo Juan Delgado Martin Espada Diana Garcia Richard Garcia Ray Gonzalez Maurice Kilwein Guevara Juan Felipe Herrera Dionisio D. Martinez Valerie Martinez Gloria Vando
City of the Big Shoulders by
Chicago has served as touchstone and muse to generations of writers and artists defined by their relationship to the city's history, lore, inhabitants, landmarks, joys and sorrows, pride and shame. The poetic conversations inspired by Chicago have long been a vital part of America's literary landscape, from Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks to experimental writers and today's slam poets. The one hundred contributors to this vibrant collection take their materials and their inspirations from the city itself in a way that continues this energetic dialogue. The cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic diversity in this gathering of poems springs from a variety of viewpoints, styles, and voices as multifaceted and energetic as the city itself. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz: "I want to eat / in a city smart enough to know that if you / are going to have that heart attack, you might / as well have the pleasure of knowing // you've really earned it"; Renny Golden: "In the heat of May 1937, my grandfather / sits in the spring grass of an industrial park / with hundreds of striking steelworkers"; Joey Nicoletti: "The wind pulls a muscle / as fans yell the vine off the outfield wall, / mustard-stained shirts, hot dog smiles, and all." The combined energies of these poems reveal the mystery and beauty that is Second City, the City by the Lake, New Gotham, Paris on the Prairie, the Windy City, the Heart of America, and Sandburg's iconic City of the Big Shoulders.
A People's History of Chicago by
Known variously as "'the Windy City,"' "'the City of Big Shoulders,"' or "'Chi-Raq,"' Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world. Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape. Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois--Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city's unofficial poet laureate."
Illinois Voices by
Illinois may at first glance seem distant from the epicenter of the literary rebellion of twentieth-century poetry, but much of that revolt was fomented by writers of the Chicago Renaissance and unfurled in the pages of Chicago's own little magazine, Harriet Monroe's Poetry. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology marked a further turning on the road of experimentation. Illinois Voices includes the work of more than seventy-five poets, both those closely associated with Illinois (Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Kenneth Fearing, John Knoepfle) and those, such as Oak Park-born Ernest Hemingway, whose connection with the state may surprise. Some poems reflect a strong regional sensibility; many others have more universal concerns. Defining an Illinois poet as one born in Illinois or one who produced a considerable body of significant work while living in the state, this generous volume covers a range of poetic styles and aesthetics, from formalist to avant-garde, jazz-inspired to rural plain-speaking. The editors collaborated closely with the living poets in selecting the pieces included. From Gwendolyn Brooks's cutting portrait of the "Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League" to Allison Joseph's urban "homemade streetcorner music" to Lisel Mueller's gently sardonic map of the small-town Midwest ("Austrian food is not served in Vienna, / and people in Paris drink Coke, not wine"), Illinois Voices magnifies the fragile threads of human connection. These rich and memorable poems transmit not only the quirky, multifaceted personality of the state but also a human geography that transcends precise location.
Colcha by
Winner of a 2002 American Book Award Winner of the 2002 Colorado Book Award in Poetry "The natural voice at work in the poetry sings of one human life as if it were our own. I loved listening." --Rita Kiefer, author of Nesting Doll "This just may be one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. . . . This is the kind of writing that give poetry a good name." --Mike Nobles, Tulsa World "Abeyta's poetry amazingly captures this struggle with poems that are simultaneously tortured and thankful, celebratory and melancholy, earthly and ethereal. . . . Poet Abeyta beautifully captures the hardships of living in rural Colorado." --Blue Sky Quarterly "Abeyta writes about family, friends, and famous (and infamous) locals. His approach is intimate and daring while avoiding the self-absorbed, coffee-house clichés we fear. Yes, death plays a role in the connection of community and the land, but these poems are sly rather than dark, modulated rather than graphic, sweet rather than maudlin." --Wayne Sheldrake, Colorado Central Magazine In Colcha, Aaron Abeyta blends the contrasting rhythms of the English and Spanish languages, finding music in a simple yet memorable lyricism without losing the complexity and mystery of personal experience. His forty-two poems take the reader on a journey through a contemplative personal history that explores communal, political and societal issues as well as the individual experiences of family and friends. With his distinctive voice, Abeyta invites people of all cultures to enter his poems by exploring the essence of humanity as expressed by his particular Hispanic culture and heritage. Marked by intimacy and deep sentiment, Colcha not only acquaints us with the land of Abeyta's people, but also reveals the individuals from his life and family history in the most colorful and delicate detail. We meet his abuelitos (grandparents) in poems such as "colcha" and "3515 Wyandot," and hear of their connection to the tierra and its seasons, their labor and its bounty presented both viscerally and lovingly. We also meet the nameless people: the rancheros and the herders and the farmers, the locals in their pick-up trucks, and the women who make the tortillas. Abeyta's reflections on the plight, loves, joys, failures, and exploitation of the common person in such poems as "cuando se secan las acequias," "untitled (verde)," and "cinco de mayo" belong to the literary heritage of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Walt Whitman. Colcha is not just for those who love poetry, but for all people who wish to be moved by the music of language and, while listening, perhaps to gain some personal insight into their own lives and cultural traditions.
City of a Hundred Fires by
Named one of Library Journal's Top 20 Poetry Books of 1998Winner of the 1997 Agnes Lynch Starrett PrizeRunner up for the Great Lakes Colleges Association 1999 New Writers AwardCity of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American. This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents--the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.
The Other Man Was Me by
Winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition.Finalist in the American Library Association's 1995 Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award in the literature category.Finalist in the PEN Center USA West 1995 Literary Awards in the poetry category.Finalist in the Lambda Book Award in the gay men's poetry category.
Cenzontle by
Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award An NPR Best Book of 2018 In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn--sometimes all at once.
After a Thousand Tears by
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was the most prolific female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1877 in Atlanta, Georgia, Johnson devoted much of her artistic imagination to indexing African American women's interior life and advancing the means through which to achieve interracial cooperation. After a Thousand Tears represents the only extant poetry collection that Johnson authored between 1928 and 1962, and it illustrates her more nuanced and transgressive prescription for gender, racial, and national advancement. Although scholars have critically examined Johnson's four previously published collections of poetry (The Heart of a Woman [1918], Bronze [1922], An Autumn Love Cycle [1928], and Share My World [1962]), they have never engaged After a Thousand Tears. Jimmy Worthy II located the unpublished work while conducting archival research at Emory University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Worthy discovered that while Johnson intended to publish Tears with Padma Publications of Bombay in 1947, the project never came to fruition. Published now, for the first time, this volume features eighty-one poems that offer Johnson's intimate and forthright sensibility toward African American women's lived experiences during and following the Harlem Renaissance.
Come Kingdom by
Derrick Harriell?s new book, Come Kingdom, chronicles a Black man?s journey toward an ever-elusive American Dream with poems anchored in the trenches of personal crossroads ranging from child conception to substance abuse and racism. The collection follows a male speaker as he and his partner family plan, hoping to provide their son with a sibling. Their troubles burst through in bold poems that incorporate both medical and mental hurdles. At the same time, it pays homage to Black musical icons such as Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur, and Nipsey Hussle. With spirited vulnerability and gritty lyricism, Harriell reveals the stakes and hauntings of relentless generational traumas. A tour de force of outcry and courage, Come Kingdom confronts shifting social, political, and musical climates. On a more intimate level, it also follows a couple?s desperate attempts to become parents again.
For My People by
An exploration of race and heritage, For My People is the first book by poet and novelist Margaret Walker (1915-1998) and the 41st volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Considered among the most important collections of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance, For My People is a series of ballad poems with memorable characters, including the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a tough young woman who dies "with her boots on switching blades"; Poppa Chicken, an urban drug dealer and pimp; John Henry, killed by a ten-pound hammer; and Stagolee, who kills a white officer but eludes a lynch mob. The memorable title poem evokes the power of resilience not only for black people, but for all people.
Electric Arches by
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances--blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects--hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook--as precious icons. Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant--a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up. Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.
Slow Trains Overhead by
Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience--a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more--these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg. Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.
A People's History of Chicago by
Known variously as "'the Windy City,"' "'the City of Big Shoulders,"' or "'Chi-Raq,"' Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world. Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape. Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois--Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city's unofficial poet laureate."
Limelight by
From thirteen-year-old award-winning slam poet Solli Raphael comes Limelight, an extraordinary book that showcases that age is no barrier to creating poetry that inspires social change and positive action. Limelight is a unique collection of slam poetry paired with inspirational writing techniques. With over 30 original poems in different forms, Raphael's work tackles current social concerns for his generation, such as sustainability and social equality, all while amplifying his uplifting message of hope. Solli's book also contains 5 chapters on how to write and read poetry, how to manage stage fright and writer's block, and encouraging tips on how we can all make tomorrow better than today. As a voice of his generation, and at a time when youth movements worldwide hold much importance, Raphael is taking on the world...one word at a time. The future needs you and me to create equality across all levels of humanity -Solli
Poetry In America: S2
The Poetry Lounge: Understanding the Power of the Spoken Word
Sun Ra - A Joyful Noise
Voices From Inside: Women Prisoners & Their Children Speak Out
Big Joy: The Adventures of James BroughtonCheck out other TED Talk Poetry Performances, or talks on Poetry!
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