The Academy of American Poets has partnered with Treehouse Investments, a social impact firm, to found the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, which will honor "exceptional poems that help make real for readers the gravity of the vulnerable state of our environment at present."
Submissions for the first prize will be accepted online from September 1 through November 1. The winning poets will be announced March 19, 2020, the first day of spring.
Three poets will be honored, with prizes of $1,000 for first place, $750 for second place, and $500 for third place. In addition, all three poems will be published in the Poem-a-Day series, which is distributed to 500,000 readers.
Judges for the 2019 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize are author and environmentalist Bill McKibben and poet and author Julia Alvarez.
Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said, "We're grateful to have the opportunity to address the climate crisis through poetry and hope the poets' poems we'll publish might inspire people to learn more about the issue and how they can help."
Dominique Slavin, managing director of Treehouse Investments, said, "The science of climate change is unequivocal; its negative social and financial consequences are clear; the technological solutions to reverse it exist. And yet we as a society are clearly failing to deal with the issue at sufficient scale and speed. So why address climate change with poems? Because a good poem can remind us of everything we share, and everything we put at risk. Because poems are the backbone of our culture and this, more than anything else, is what needs to change."