The Poetry Coalition is a national alliance of nearly thirty organizations working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Members are nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to promote poets and poetry, and/or multi-genre literary organizations that serve poets in the disability community and of specific racial, ethnic, or gender identities, backgrounds, or communities. All members present poets at live events. (Founding members are denoted with an asterisk.)

Each March, members present programming across the country on a theme of social importance, which has included poetry & migration, poetry & the body, poetry & democracy, poetry & protest, poetry & environmental justice, and poetry & disability justice. Programs range from publications to panels, readings, and other public events.

In 2023, the Poetry Coalition explored the theme “and so much lost      you’d think / beauty had left a lesson: Poetry & Grief” in a series of virtual and in-person programs. The line “and so much lost      you’d think / beauty had left a lesson” is from Ed Roberson’s poem “once the magnolia has blossomed.” 

In May 2020, the Poetry Coalition launched the Poetry Coalition Fellowship program, a three-year pilot program that offered paid fellowship positions to five fellows per year (a total of fifteen fellows) who assisted a different Poetry Coalition organization for twenty hours per week over the course of a forty-week period. The five organizations that hosted the inaugural Poetry Coalition Fellows in 2020-21 were CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Mizna, and Split This Rock. The second cohort of Poetry Coalition Fellows were hosted in 2021-22 by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Beyond Baroque, Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), Lambda Literary, and Zoeglossia. The third cohort of Poetry Coalition Fellows were hosted in 2022-23 by Letras Latinas, Mass Poetry, Urban Word, Woodland Pattern, and Youth Speaks.

On August 18, 2020, the founding members of the Poetry Coalition presented a live broadcast of  One Poem: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives. In this first-ever nationwide reading curated by the coalition, a poet invited by each founding member organization shared a poem in support of Black lives. Readers included Kazim Ali, Kimberly Blaeser, Jericho Brown, Kwame Dawes, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Safia Elhillo, Martín Espada, Sesshu Foster, Alberto Ríos, Monica Youn, and more.

The Academy of American Poets is the administrative and fiscal coordinator of the Poetry Coalition and we are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support of this work. For more information please contact [email protected] and follow along on social media at #PoetryCoalition.