Fundraising pitch for Poetry in America series featuring high‑profile cultural figures

Here’s what we have to report, and to show, a year later, thanks to your help. Links offer sneak peeks of works -in-progress across the full portfolio of Poetry in America projects. ° The first eight-episode season of the public television series Poetry in America (a co- production between WGBH, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker David Grubin, and my own new production company, Verse Video), is now fully funded and in production, with episodes featuring Bill Clinton, Herbie Hancock and Sonia Sanchez _on Langston Hughes, Frank Gehry on Carl Sandburg, Katie Couric on Elizabeth Bishop, Nas on Whitman, and many more scheduled for nationwide launch in 2017. ° Poetry in America’s many initiatives to reach Middle and High School teachers and their students are taking root. Our first online course for Middle and High School Teachers, Poetry of the City, will launch this Spring with the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Companion materials to this course will be made available for free on PBS LearningMedia. This course is designed to meet the needs of English Language Arts and Social Studies teachers in the US and internationally. ° We are eager to begin production of The Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky. Designed, too, for Middle and High School teachers, The Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky will draw English Language Arts instruction into dialogue with science, and will include extraordinary footage of the natural world, conversations with poets, scholars, and scientists as well as footage shot in class and in the field with great teachers. ° A recent partnership with Greenwich Country Day School and the Success Academy Network of charter schools will provide a base for the production of a new collection of classroom-ready educational material on The Poetry of Art, Sport, and Play. This collection will include discussions on poems filmed everywhere from sports fields to Broadway theaters, and will feature dancers, athletes, fashion designers, and more. ° With a growing archive of footage capturing teachers and students reading American poems, we are eager to expand our reach and move into America’s schools, disseminating, testing, and learning from teachers and students using our materials. We hope to be able to begin work evaluating the impact of poetry on literacy levels and character development and, eventually, to produce a full suite of materials that foster character development along with intellectual growth. Working closely with such partners as The Nantucket Project, Nautilus Magazine, The Aspen Ideas Festival, and The Big Think, and, of course, HarvardX, Harvard’s provider of free open online courses, we are continuing to create rich educational media on poetry for adult learners and lifelong learners. These materials include short form videos such as this one on Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt” (as featured in The New Yorker), and, this spring, the sixth module of the free seven-part Poetry in America MOOC, which has registrants in over 150 countries. Growing rapidly, and outpacing our current staff and infrastructure, Poetry in America has a fundraising goal this year of 2.5 million dollars to fund its expanding group of projects. We've taken a big step, hiring the design agency Threespot to help us develop our web presence. Our website— to launch early 2016— will eventually serve as an online hub for our TV show and educational projects. We hope you'll join us then for a virtual launch! Finally, Jeffrey, you have been such a wonderful supporter of my Poetry in America project. The Leon Black gift changed everything for me last year. It paid salaries for staff | desperately needed to complete projects (detail below), but first and foremost, it gave me leverage, enabling me to set down a Solid Harvard base for my activities by giving the school something to point to: this public HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029243