Dear Friend,

We hope you enjoyed receiving a Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets during National Poetry Month. We were delighted to share with you poems from some of the terrific new books being published this spring.

Our Poem-A-Day subscription base is now a whopping 36,000, a 45% increase over last year. And our website, Poets.org, received a record-breaking 1.35 million visitors during April, making it the most popular site about poetry on the web.

While these increases are extremely heartening, anyone who has a computer and an internet provider knows that these things aren't "free." For Poets.org, technical production costs alone—including the bandwidth to serve 12 million annual visitors—are $65,000 per year.

That is why I am writing to you now, in the hopes that you will consider making a donation to the Academy of American Poets at this time so that we can continue to bring you great services like Poem-A-Day, streaming audio and video, RSS feeds, and Poets.org itself, which is updated with new content daily.

Please consider making a gift of, say, $36—one dollar for every day a poem appeared in your email inbox this year. Every donation, no matter how small or large, supports the care and maintenance of Poets.org. Any amount you might be able to afford, whether that’s $10 or $100, would make a real difference to the online services we are able to provide every day, every minute, of every year to millions of people.

Whether you can make a donation or not, I am pleased to offer you an 11-track downloadable CD, recorded last month during our National Poetry Month reading series. These recordings are yours to enjoy, with our compliments. To download it, visit: www.poets.org/freecd

There are so many creative and useful things we want to do at Poets.org, but all of it requires funds to pay for writers, technology, and bandwidth to meet our readers' ever-growing needs and desires. To do all of this we sell a bit of advertising on certain pages, but we try hard to make the advertising as relevant and unobtrusive as possible. In fact, we don't accept advertisements that aren’t directly tied to our mission.

The Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so 100% of donations are tax deductible. And 100% of your donation in response to this email will go directly toward Poets.org—helping us add more poems, poet biographies, essays, interviews, and recordings to the site, as well as accommodating our ever-growing audience.

This is the last email we'll send to Poem-A-Day subscribers until next National Poetry Month. But your tax-deductible financial support today would mean a great deal to us. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Tree Swenson
Executive Director
Academy of American Poets

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