PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn to Step Down in 2019

The New York Times reports that Alice Quinn, long-time executive director of the Poetry Society of America, will step down from her leadership position in June. Reporter Sara Aridi writes, "[s]ince joining the organization in 2001, Ms. Quinn has steered numerous programs that celebrate poetry through partnerships with prominent cultural organizations, including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Los Angeles Public Library and the New York Botanical Garden." From there: 

Most recently, Ms. Quinn spearheaded the creation of two awards: the Four Quartets Prize for a unified sequence of poems, funded by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, and the Anna Rabinowitz Prize for an interdisciplinary work featuring poetry.

“In the eyes of the American literary world, Alice Quinn is a national treasure, beloved for her extraordinary knowledge of, passion for and devotion to poetry,” Kimiko Hahn, the president of the poetry society, said in a statement.

Her resignation coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Poetry in Motion program, a beloved initiative that decorates New York’s subways with bite-size works chosen by the poetry society, and with the 15th anniversary of the society’s Chapbook Fellowship Program. Winners of the Chapbook Program have been chosen and introduced by distinguished poets such as John Ashbery and Eavan Boland.

Ms. Quinn, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, is the editor of “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments,” by Elizabeth Bishop. She was the poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007.

She has been working on an edition of Bishop’s journals to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Read more at the New York Times.