Media Partnerships

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Ours Poetica is an online video series, hosted on a dedicated YouTube channel, that captures the intimate experience of holding a poem in your hands and listening as it is read by a distinctive voice. Ours Poetica features poets, writers, artists, and sometimes unexpected—yet familiar—guests who have an interest in poetry. Curators include Charlotte Abotsi, Sarah Kay, and Paige Lewis. Ours Poetica is presented by the Poetry Foundation and Complexly.

Subscribe and watch at YouTube.com/OursPoetica

The Slowdown is a weekday poetry podcast hosted by award-winning poet Major Jackson; in a short episode each weekday, Jackson delivers a poem and a moment of reflection, offering listeners a different way to see the world–through poetry. Past hosts include Ada Limòn and Tracy K. Smith.

Produced in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media, new episodes of The Slowdown are available every weekday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms.

Listen to a preview and subscribe to the podcast here.

The Poetry Foundation has partnered with the Chicago Reader since 2020 to bring poetry to a local audience via Poetry Corner. Every other week, the free print and digital publication shares a poem from a Chicago writer, providing emerging local writers with a platform and readers with a chance to engage with new poetry. The poems for this section are selected by acclaimed Chicago poets, with regularly rotating curatorships.

Past Partnerships

American Life in Poetry was a free weekly column for newspapers, online publications, and individuals that featured contemporary American poems selected and introduced by Kwame Dawes and his predecessor, Ted Kooser. Nationally syndicated to millions of readers across the country each week for nearly 18 years, the column was funded by the Poetry Foundation with administrative support provided by the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The Poetry Series, featured on the PBS NewsHour and funded by the Poetry Foundation, engaged a broader audience with poetry through a series of thoughtful, in-depth reports on contemporary poets and poetry. The series included short-form profiles of living American poets and long-form segments on current debates in poetry. Segments in the series featured Washington, DC-area high school students as they prepared for and participated in Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest, reports on the poetry of the Middle East and the business of publishing poetry, and profiles of poets, including Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, John Ashbery, Li-Young Lee, Natasha Trethewey, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

The Poetry Foundation partnered with HBO to produce two specials designed to introduce children to poetry through animation and song. Classical Baby (I’m Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show featured the voice talents of Susan Sarandon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Garcia, and John Lithgow. The show received an Emmy® for Outstanding Children’s Program in 2008. A Child’s Garden of Poetry featured readings from Claire Danes, Carrie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ziggy Marley, Dave Matthews, Natalie Merchant, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Jeffrey Wright. The show received an Emmy® for Outstanding Children’s Program in 2011. Both shows are available on DVD.

The Poetry Foundation’s support allowed NPR to produce more stories about poetry on the radio and online and to create innovative features like “NewsPoet,” in which a poet was invited into the NPR All Things Considered newsroom to see how the show came together and to write an original poem about the news. Featured poets included Tracy K. Smith, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Kevin Young.

In the weekly “Poetry Pairing” series, the Poetry Foundation collaborated with The Learning Network of the New York Times to feature a poem from Poetry magazine or from the public domain alongside content from the Times that somehow echoes, extends, or challenges the poem’s themes.

PoetryNow was a weekly four-minute radio series that featured some of today’s most accomplished and innovative poets who offered an acoustically rich and reflective look into a single poem.

PoetryNow was produced in partnership by the Poetry Foundation and WFMT Radio Network.