[Newspoetry] NYTimes.com Article: Poets' Academy to Cut Its Staff

[futrelle at ncsa.uiuc.edu]

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by futrelle at ncsa.uiuc.edu.


It looks like the poetry sector is the latest victim of the sagging economy and the terrorist attacks.

Accordingly, Newspoetry is going to have to lay off half of its staff.

futrelle at ncsa.uiuc.edu


Poets' Academy to Cut Its Staff

November 9, 2001 

By DAVID KIRKPATRICK


 

The board of the Academy of American Poets, the 65-year-old
organization best known for making April poetry month and
for its popular Web site, has decided to lay off nearly
half its staff to forestall an impending financial crisis. 

The board met Wednesday amid protests from prominent poets
over the ouster of the academy's executive director,
William Wadsworth, himself a poet. The board said Mr.
Wadsworth had not met requests to curtail spending as new
contributions dried up. But Mr. Wadsworth, 51, said he had
cut the budget when asked. In a memo to the board, he
blamed it for not raising as much money as expected. Poets
worried that the academy's programs might be curtailed. 

Jonathan Galassi, who is the board's chairman, a poet and
the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the board
had decided to lay off 8 of its 17 employees and to
sublease half of its office space in SoHo. The board also
set out to raise a new "stabilization fund," doubling the
amount the board will try to raise to $500,000 over two
years. Charles Flowers, 36, associate director of the
academy, will become acting director while the board hunts
a successor to Mr. Wadsworth, who formally leaves at the
end of the year. 

The academy programs include: a national series of poetry
readings, several awards and grants and a mail-order poetry
book club, as well as the Web site (www.poets.org) and
promoting poetry month. 

Mr. Galassi said that only the poetry book club, which has
not made money, faced an uncertain future. "The whole goal
was to keep the programs going," he said. "The programs are
what the academy exists to do, but we are going to try a
more cost-effective approach." 

Mr. Galassi said that he was writing an explanatory letter
to the poets on the academy's advisory board, and so is the
poet J. D. McClatchy. 

One poet on the advisory board, Philip Levine, said he
planned to resign over the moves. "I'm outraged," he said,
particularly by the removal of Mr. Wadsworth without
consulting the advisers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/books/09POET.html?ex=1006321177&ei=1&en=abdd63f3e7f56948



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