From the desk of Amy Stolls, literary arts director, National Endowment for the Arts

When Amanda Gorman spoke at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, people around the nation were exposed to the power of poetry, and saw how much skill and creativity it takes to bring a poem’s words to life. For more than 15 years, Poetry Out Loud™ has given millions of high school students a similar platform through a national poetry recitation competition.

An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud is offered in all 50 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. The program is organized at the local level by schools or organizations, and coordinators have access to a free teacher’s guide and an online anthology of classic and contemporary poetry. With more than 1,100 poems in the anthology, students gain an understanding of the breadth of poetry, while having the freedom to discover poems with which they feel a connection. As students participate in Poetry Out Loud, not only do they develop a deeper appreciation for poetry, they also improve their analytical skills while building self-confidence and public speaking skills.

More than four million students have participated in Poetry Out Loud since 2005, many advancing from classroom competitions to school competitions to state competitions and ultimately to the national finals where students compete for the grand prize of $20,000. Non-school organizations, such as after-school clubs, libraries, or nonprofit organizations, may also host Poetry Out Loud and have students advance to state competitions. In total, Poetry Out Loud will award more than $100,000 to state- and national-level winners and their schools in 2022.

Visit PoetryOutLoud.org to learn more about this program, and to access free materials, including guidelines on how to hold competitions in-person or virtually. To participate in the official 2021-2022 program, contact the Poetry Out Loud coordinator in your state or jurisdiction.

We hope you will help us grow this national competition and bring the power of poetry to even more students in the coming year.

Amy Stolls
Director, Literary Arts
Literary Arts & Arts Education Division
National Endowment for the Arts

Amy Stolls is the Director of Literary Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. She oversees a portfolio that includes grants to organizations for projects such as the publication of books and literary journals, book festivals, writing workshops, and reading series; fellowships to individual poets, prose writers, and translators; Poetry Out Loud, a program that engages high school students nationwide in the public recitation of poetry; and the NEA Big Read, a national initiative that supports community-wide reading programs around the country designed around a single book.

Stolls has more than 18 years of experience in the NEA’s Literary Arts program managing various grant programs and special initiatives. She has advised on and reviewed thousands of proposals from organizations and thousands more from individuals, has moderated more than 80 panels, and has been a public speaker on the topic of literature at conferences and festivals around the country and abroad, including the Moscow Book Festival, where she led a team of U.S. participants. She spearheads the NEA’s involvement in the National Book Festival, working with the Library of Congress on programming and promotion for the Poetry & Prose Pavilion. To draw attention to the NEA’s creative writing fellows, Stolls initiated in 2001 and helps manage Meet Our Fellows on the NEA website, featuring bios and excerpts from winning manuscripts.

Stolls’ publishing credits include the young adult novel Palms to the Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), winner of the 2005 Parents’ Choice Gold Award, and the novel The Ninth Wife (HarperCollins, 2011), as well as numerous personal and literature-related essays. For the NEA, she co-edited the anthology The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation; wrote the introduction to NEA Literature Fellowships: 40 Years of Supporting American Writers, and co-wrote the chapter on literature in the book National Endowment for the Arts, A History: 1965-2008. 

Prior to her time at the NEA, Stolls was an environmental journalist who gained international recognition for her coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She has an MFA in creative writing from American University, where she has taught courses on contemporary literature.