National Poetry Month

Welcome to a city full of poetry! In the Neighborhood is a community-based project created by Spokane Poet Laureate Chris Cook and Spokane Arts to collect and share poetry exploring Spokane neighborhoods. Written by area residents past and present, of all ages and experience levels, the poems here each showcase unique perspectives on our city. Together they do one magical thing: share the many stories of our neighborhoods!
Wander through the Spokane neighborhoods below and find poetry in a range of styles, representing people and places all over the city and beyond. (Or use the site-wide search bar at the top right to search for a specific poet by name.)
Community members can continue to submit poems, which will be added to the site monthly.
In honor of National Poetry Month (April), Spokane Arts commissioned a short video featuring eight community members reading their poems from the “In the Neighborhood” project.

Spokane Public Radio is excited to present Poetry Moment, a program that showcases myriad poems as read by poets and poetry lovers from across the Inland Northwest — and occasionally beyond!
Poetry Moment airs one poem on KPBX each weekday at 9am; a single reader curates the entire week’s worth of poetry. Sometimes the poems are the reader's own, and sometimes they're written by poets whose work they admire and want to share with listeners.
Since its start in 2018, Poetry Moment has featured readers ranging from the Washington State Poet Laureate and popular local slam poets to listeners who simply want to give voice to a few of their favorite pieces.

This poetry grid is a project of Seattle’s first Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna. It traces the city in the voices of its citizens, from folks new to expressing themselves in poems to well established and beloved writers. We each carry a personal map of the place we inhabit. We live in the city and the city lives in us.

Poems are selected by Poetry Foundation editors and guests to correspond with historic events, poet anniversaries, and more from the 49,000+ poem archive.

Delve into an immersive exploration of a single poem. Short and unhurried; contemplative and energizing — with a podcast, a book, a vibrant conversation on Substack, and occasional gatherings.
Pádraig Ó Tuama greets you at these doorways to brilliant poems, and invites you to meet them with stories of your world. The poems are eager to meet you, too.

In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned by the Spike 150 Foundation to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result is West: A Translation: a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.
West connects the completion of the transcontinental railroad with another significant American historical event: the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed thirteen years after the first transcontinental’s completion.

The collection of short video documentaries showcases individual Americans reading and speaking personally about poems they love. The videos have been regular features on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and are a permanent part of the Library of Congress archive of recorded poetry and literature.

Poets.org is produced by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit charitable organization. The site was launched in 1996, becoming the first online resource for poems, poets' biographies, essays about poetry, and materials for K-12 teachers.

An interactive learning tool that can help you understand what makes metered poetry in English tick.