A Commitment to Clarity
In November 2023, members of the poetry community published an open letter, subsequently signed by many others, declaring a boycott of the Poetry Foundation. After multiple conversations, internally and with several of the organizers, the boycott was lifted by the organizers in March 2024.
It would be reductive and insulting to all involved to claim that the circumstances that led to the boycott can be boiled down to a single cause or incident. The past five months have carried with them immense pain: the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, rising violence, and concurrent humanitarian crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen—to say nothing of the suffering that goes largely unreported.
Public calls for action, such as the recent boycott, are not new for cultural institutions in general, nor for the Poetry Foundation, which has been in a state of change since 2020. That said, this particular call prompted us to examine and affirm our institutional values.
While we believed that we were embodying our mission and values, and communicating them effectively, this experience has taught us that there is a gap in how our communities, collaborators, and the general public understand the Poetry Foundation’s role in poetry and philanthropy. We are endeavoring to correct that here, and with ongoing efforts. We do not want to center ourselves in the conversations about the horrifying violence in Gaza, only to clarify the role of the Poetry Foundation as it exists today.
What the Poetry Foundation Is
In 2022, the Poetry Foundation became a 501(c)(3) exempt private nonoperating foundation, and instituted its first overarching grantmaking strategy. Prior to this, the Foundation was a private operating foundation, which did not hold grantmaking as central to its work. This update was reflective of the 2020 calls for change within the literary and philanthropic ecosystem, as well as internal and external feedback, and was implemented in the Foundation's strategic plan introduced in the summer of 2022.
Our current mission, which was established with this strategic plan, is “to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry.” Our mission is grounded by our values of sharing, collaboration, equity, access, innovation, and growth.
What the Poetry Foundation Does
Throughout its 20 years of existence, the Poetry Foundation has supported poets and poetry via publishing, programming, and awards—and more recently, through administering grants to nonprofit organizations. In the service of these efforts, the Foundation does not censor poets or dictate the topics they might discuss while writing for, recording with, or performing at the Foundation. We made a commitment to being an antiracist organization and, therefore, do not publish or platform hate speech of any kind. We also have zero tolerance for plagiarism and misconduct detrimental to our communities.
To foster improved communication, connection, and understanding, we are sharing the guidelines and policies that outline how we approach our work and how each area of impact represents our vision to support poetry in all its diversity.
Grants
In December 2021, the Poetry Foundation announced a grantmaking strategy to support poetry and the literary arts with an initial commitment of $9 million over three years. Since the launch in 2022, the Poetry Foundation has awarded more than $6.3 million in grants to 256 US-based nonprofit organizations, presses, programs, and publications. The Poetry Foundation's grants program operates on the principles of trust-based philanthropy: it is open, accessible, and relationship-based while measurably investing in equity in the field. Learn more about the grants program, grantee-partners, and eligibility.
Editorial (digital and print)
In 2022, the Foundation hired its first editor of color and established a commitment to publishing poets from marginalized communities, including poets who have never been featured in Poetry magazine. The Editorial Policy provides insights into content goals for Poetry and editorial content on the website, as well as transparency into the process of selecting poems, essays, and other content we publish. This policy ladders up to our values by ensuring we prioritize equity, access, and innovation in the work we share on our platforms.
Programs
The Poetry Foundation hosts live poetry events in Chicago that are free and open to the public with opportunities to connect remotely. These events center poets who chronicle, celebrate, reflect, and reframe our world through rigorous poetic practices, and are offered in the Poetry Foundation’s event space, library, and at other locations in partnership with cultural institutions. Our programs and events have focused on presenting BIPOC poets, poets working in disability poetics, and performers who have been underrepresented on our stages in the past, as well as highlighting collaborative relationships between poets and artists in other disciplines.
Our events are only one part of the programming we offer; the Programs Policy provides our framework for our programming, articulating how our team decides about which programs to present and laying out how organizations and individuals can submit event proposals for consideration.
Exhibitions
Poetry Foundation exhibitions reflect poetry as an expansive art form, its ecosystem, and the poets and practitioners who sustain it. We believe in the connective power of poetry and its ability to uplift human experiences. The Foundation presents three exhibitions annually in our building that reflect the loosely defined categories of community, contemporary art, and poetry archives.
Learn more about our Exhibitions Policy.
Investments
The Poetry Foundation was established after the Modern Poetry Association received a gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly in 2002. The funds are invested to ensure that our grantmaking, publications, and programs continue to operate in perpetuity and provide ongoing support to the poetry ecosystem.
Our commitment to diversity and equity extends to our investment portfolio. In 2020, the Foundation divested from funds that profit from arms, fossil fuels, and prisons. We are continuing our work to ensure that our investment objectives align with the Foundation’s values. In 2024, we will re-evaluate our investment policy to ensure our commitment to responsible investing, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG); negative screening; diversity; and impact investing.
In Closing
The gift that established the Poetry Foundation 20 years ago gave us a tremendous opportunity; our role as a 501(c)(3) exempt private nonoperating foundation enables us to share our resources for the public good, and we do that through poetry. We recognize the privilege and responsibility we have as an organization built around poetry, a powerful form of storytelling, expression, and connection.
Our mission, values, and vision compel us to honor and uphold the confidence of our audiences. We hope that the principles that guide us are made evident through our grantmaking, programs, publications, communications, and the policies informing how we approach our work.
We maintain that it is not the role of the Poetry Foundation to make institutional statements about geopolitical crises. What we can do, however, is provide a platform for poets who are most impacted by and connected to those crises, and use the space we take up in the world of poetry accordingly.
We recognize that there will always be opportunities to improve, and we welcome conversations about how we can support poetry and poets more robustly. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that our communities have called on us to do better. We’re grateful for what we’ve learned and grown through these experiences.
We firmly believe that despite the many challenges of today and tomorrow, together, in our collective capacity, we can achieve our vision to support poetry in all its diversity. To quote June Jordan in her poem “On a New Year’s Eve:”
it is this time
that matters
it is this history
I care about
the one we make together
We look forward to making this history alongside you.
The Poetry Foundation