Poem-a-Day - A Year of Sheltering in Poems

Black Lives Matter and the Poem-a-Day Summer Series 

Virtual Summer Camp 

Nonprofit Organizations Awarded $50,000

Thanks to a collaboration between the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and its Board of Directors, ten organizations each received a $5,000 contribution from the Academy. Organizations and presses were recommended by the Academy’s Chancellors, and funds were raised by its Board of Directors.

Get Your Free Copy of the 2021 National Poetry Month Poster!

This year’s poster was designed by Bao Lu, a twelfth grader from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, New York and the winner of the 2021 National Poetry Month Poster Contest. Get your free copy of the poster!
 

What Sasha Pimentel is Currently Reading

“I spent the morning typing up the two versions of James Baldwin’s ‘A Letter to My Nephew,’ how it first appeared in The Progressive in 1962, versus the 1963 version in The Fire Next Time as ‘My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.’ I do this a lot, transcribe a writer’s text, and I do it a lot with Baldwin because it’s a way to enter, and be inside, his sentences. To see how he’s working through his clauses, and his commas, and his punctuation. I don’t think I ever understood the power of a comma until I started studying Baldwin. How he can just distill a clarity, and weight, into a part of language with the right pauses.”

—Sasha Pimentel, author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017), and Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for the month of March.