POETRY ALIVE: Bringing Poetry into Communities, to be published in 2011, will comprise essays by poets with national and international reputations discussing important programs and vehicles for bringing poetry into specific communities. In addition to the essays and building from them, the book will include an appendix, which will draw from the strategies discussed in the essays and will serve as a kind of flexible toolkit for people and organizations interested in bringing poetry into their own communities at various levels and through various means. Essayists include Robert Hass, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Bas Kwakman, Lee Briccetti, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Dana Gioia, Anna Deavere Smith, and Thomas Lux.

The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and the Center for Social Media at American University are working with the poetry community to create a Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry document. This document will express the consensus view of the poetry community on what constitutes fair use of copyrighted poems in new and old media. Concurrently, the University of California at Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law is working with the HMPI to develop a clinic related to the fair use of poetry in education, with a focus on electronic media.

Katharine Coles, Director
Beth Allen, Project Manager