Ted Kooser Celebrates More Than 800 Columns & Announces Retirement from American Life in Poetry 

CHICAGO, August 24, 2020 — American Life in Poetry editor, Ted Kooser, announces his retirement, effective at the end of 2020. The announcement comes shortly after editing his 805th column and features his own poem “Red Stilts,” from the collection Red Stilts to be published in September 2020. Award-winning poet, author, and editor Kwame Dawes, PhD, will begin curating American Life in Poetry this academic year with his first column as editor to appear in January 2021.

Celebrating 15 Years of Poetry in Newspapers 
As US Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, Kooser created the column to return poetry to newspapers after seeing it disappear throughout the years. After only eight months of curating the column, American Life in Poetry was reaching 1.5 million readers a week. During his years as editor, Kooser received a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for Delights & Shadows and many other awards and distinctions.  

“Ted’s selections still resonate like his first, ‘Neighbors’ by David Allan Evans,” said Sarah Whitcher, media and marketing director of the Poetry Foundation. “The poem set the tone for the next 15 years, giving us an intimate look at the American experience. We look forward to building upon the archive, and expanding perspectives and contributors, under the leadership of Kwame Dawes.”

 The column is free for any media outlet to pick up and carry online or in print and has grown to an annual readership of 400 print columns and 20,000 weekly newsletter subscribers. American Life in Poetry can regularly be found in print and online from news outlets like Lincoln Journal Star, Lake County News, and Ames Tribune. 

Kooser’s selections and columns will continue through December, and conclude on December 28, 2020. 

“I hope our readers are not nearly as wary or even terrified of poetry as they were before we began showing them poems that weren’t problems that had to be solved, but were there to enjoy,” said Kooser.

Welcoming a New Editor
In the coming months, AmericanLifeinPoetry.org will be refreshed and updated to match Dawes’s vision for the column. Marketing and branding efforts will be revamped in the same fashion. 

“What Ted Kooser has given to us with American Life in Poetry is a wonderful insight into what gifted American poets are writing,” said Kwame Dawes. “Ted’s efforts, in so doing, have presented me with a tremendous challenge for the future—how to celebrate the ways that our best poets manage to capture the democratic idea of America through poems that have value and meaning for as broad a cross-section of readers as can be imagined.”

Dawes is no stranger to the Poetry Foundation, having served as a blogger for Harriet blog with over 100 posts published since 2007, and a handful of poems published in Poetry. He currently serves as the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Associate Poetry Editor of Peepal Tree Press in the UK, and is on the faculty of Cave Canem. Dawes also teaches in the Pacific University MFA Writing Program and is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dawes is the cofounder and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Dawes’s awards include an Emmy and a Webby for LiveHopeLove, an interactive website based on the Kwame Dawes Pulitzer Prize Center project HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica; a Forward Prize for Poetry for his first book Progeny of Air (1994); the Hollis Summers Prize for Poetry; a Pushcart Prize; a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; a Poets and Writers Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award; and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 2004 he received the Musgrave Silver Medal for contribution to the Arts in Jamaica and in 2008 the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for service to the arts in South Carolina. In 2009 he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. 

The author of numerous books, his poetry collections include Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country (2006), Impossible Flying (2006), Back of Mount Peace (2009), Hope’s Hospice (2009), Wheels (2011), Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems (2013), and City of Bones: A Testament (2017). Dawes’s novels include She’s Gone (2007), and Bivouac (2010), and his non-fiction collections include A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (2007) and Fugue and Other Writings (2012). His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius (2007) remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. 

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in American culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs.

Media Contacts:
Sarah Whitcher, Marketing and Media Director,
[email protected] 

Emily Bieniek, Media Assistant,
[email protected]