Less than a year after the term "internet" was defined in 1995, the Academy of American Poets became the first poetry organization to launch a website. Poets.org, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, rolled out with a comprehensive suite of poetry resources for K-12 teachers, essays, poets biographies, and poems. We knew then, as we know now, that poetry is the perfect art form for the digital age. Text-based, compact, and highly shareable, today, poems are reaching more readers than ever before. Each year, pages on Poets.org are visited tens of millions of times, and many of our visitors are reading poems. We can say with certainty that you should never doubt that people hunger for poems or wonder whether poetry matters.
Now, one of the top sites for poetry in the world, Poets.org continues to offer reliable, trustworthy, and unique poetry resources. The poems on Poets.org appear with the permission of poets and are presented graphically in a way that honors poems as important art objects. In fact, when we relaunched the site in 2014, we worked with designers to restore a classic literary font called Electra, especially for the poems published on Poets.org.
Instead of duplicating what already exists online, as other poetry sites have done, we’ll continue to work to fill the gaps instead, curate thoughtfully with a focus on quality over quantity, help smaller organizations reach a larger audience, and assist individuals seeking to connect with poetry events in their communities. We understand our role, as the nation’s largest membership-based organization advocating for poets and poetry, to be one of celebrating the spectrum of individuals, organizations, and institutions working online, as well as offline, to support the art form and its makers.
Because Poets.org does not have an endowment to support the site, we rely on the multitudes of members, donors, and partners who continue to make Poets.org possible. Poets.org is truly people-powered! Thank you for visiting Poets.org and helping us grow the audience for poetry.