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 humanities project among the list of projects the Dean supports. The money did it: as soon as they heard about the gift, they took my project more seriously. Because of that gift, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is space-stingy, found and rewired a studio space for me to house my video production operation and team. That gift woke up the Deans to the importance of Harvard's role in producing the highest quality humanities content for the WORLD, and not just for Harvard students. My main employee has half of her salary paid with these funds, and the foundation of our collection for PBS LearningMedia is being made with this support. This gift represented one of the most consequential shifts of the last year, allowing me create content and launch projects this year that make future projects that much more likely. If | can keep this base sturdy at Harvard, refilling these coffers, | will be that much more able to keep working.
| am also so grateful for the help you gave me in defining my project for Templeton, and, what help you have offered to give in bringing them around. | have, since Templeton turned me down, gotten funding to produce video on two of the poems I'd proposed to Templeton and to create, and test, that video in schools as | proposed. One of my partners in that project is Success Academy, where | could also expand my work with Templeton. And there are still other poems that may satisfy their character criteria more fully, including the third of the poems Id originally proposed and that Joe Biden had agreed to discuss with me (on parenthood and humility). At this point, I’m gaining the platform and the name recognition to be an effective spokesperson for the foundation on building literacy and character in the schools.
It really means a lot to me, all financial help aside, Jeffrey, that you are rooting for me and thinking about me. You push back a lot (as Larry does), and it’s always annoying but | always learn.
With abundant gratitude, Lisa
Elisa New
Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Harvard University
148 Barker Center
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
02138
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