“Poetry creates a space for empathy that no other art does.”

Although the POL National Finals were cancelled due to COVID-19, we’re happy to announce we’re working with our POL partner, the Poetry Foundation, to recognize and celebrate the 2020 state POL champions. Over the coming weeks we will honor both the students who won their state Poetry Out Loud competition (state champions) as well as students who advanced to the state finals in states that were unable to hold a competition by releasing videos of these students reciting poems from the POL anthology. You can find these videos on our YouTube channel as well as on National Endowment for the Arts social media platforms. Find more information here, including the winners of this year’s Poetry Ourselves competition.

To celebrate both National Poetry Month and Poetry Out Loud (POL) we asked poet and National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow Adrian Matejka to share with us his thoughts on what makes POL such a vital program. Here’s what he had to say.