April National Poetry Month

The 2021 poster was designed by twelfth grader Bao Lu from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, New York, who was the winner of the 2021 National Poetry Month Poster Contest, and features lines by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
 

U.S. Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo was appointed the new United States poet laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 9, 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978. Harjo is a poet, musician, and playwright. She is the author of several books of poetry

2021 NYC Youth Poet Laureate
Serena Yang is a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant and college student from Queens, NY. As a writer and activist, she's passionate about working at the intersection of art and social justice to imagine–-and then make reality––a radical future. She was a 2018-19 Resist/Recycle/Regenerate fellow with The W.O.W Project in Chinatown and a 2019 YPL Ambassador. And this past October, Serena became the 2021 NYC Youth Poet Laureate.

Spring for a Poem 

Hungry for Poetry 

By Ralph Fletcher

First I saw him chew
a tender Japanese haiku.

He ate a foot-long sonnet
with mustard seed spread upon it.

He downed a bag of ripe cinquains
while walking in the pouring rain.

He gulped an epic, chomped an ode,
wolfed a couplet to cure his cold.

He munched so many limericks,
they made him absolutely sick.

He tried a plate of fresh free verse;
but all that did was make things worse.

He took some onomatopoeia
to cure a case of diarrhea.

He ate a poem of sixteen lines,
and after that, he felt just fine.