Announcing the 2011 Edition of 30 Poets/30 Days!

I'm tremendously excited to announce the 2011 overstuffed edition of 30 Poets/30 Days, the celebration of children's poety that will take place here at GottaBook throughout April (a/k/a National Poetry Month).

Overstuffed? Yes! Because this year, I'll be posting at least one previously unpublished poem each day each by a different poet... and many days, I'll be posting two. Why the extra? I've invited back everyone who participated the last two years to see if any of them happened to be free and able to join in the fun!

Of course, not everyone's schedule allows them to jump in again this time around... but considering how late in the day I asked, it's amazing how many poets have come back to play. Here's the current alphabetical list, though I suspect it will change over the next two weeks:

Arnold Adoff, Jaime Adoff, Francisco X. Alarcón, Kathi Appelt, Jorge Argueta, Brod Bagert, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Calef Brown, Joseph Bruchac, James Carter, Kurt Cyrus, Graham Denton, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Ralph Fletcher, Douglas Florian, Kristine O'Connell George, Charles Ghigna, Joan Bransfield Graham, Nikki Grimes, Avis Harley, David L. Harrison, Alan Katz, Bobbi Katz, Julie Larios, J. Patrick Lewis, George Ella Lyon, Elaine Magliaro, Heidi Mordhorst, Kenn Nesbitt, Linda Sue Park, Ann Whitford Paul, Greg Pincus, Laura Purdie Salas, Liz Garton Scanlon, Joyce Sidman, Marilyn Singer, Susan Marie Swanson, Charles Waters, April Halprin Wayland, Carole Boston Weatherford, Janet Wong, Jane Yolen, Tracie Vaughn Zimmer

How excited am I? Well, let's just say I was missing one poet when I looked at my list of who I was contacting... and I double and triple checked to figure out who it could be. Finally, I realized: it was me. Yup. I'm so excited, I've forgotten myself! The poems that are already rolling in are fantastic, so I can promise another great April ahead wherein I will get more and more excited.

There are a few easy ways to follow along. You can visit here every day. You can subscribe to GottaBook via email or your blog reader.

You can join my poetry list, and get all the poems emailed out the day they hit my blog. Enter your email address below and click subscribe:

That list runs year round, by the way, so whenever I post a poem here, whether my own or a visiting poet's, you'll see it.

Plus you can join the fun on Twitter. You can follow me there for links to the poems every day (and much more), or follow @30poets30days for purely poetry tweeting.

A huge thanks goes out to the uber-talented Mary Peterson who has whipped up this year's logo and saving me from my own forgetfulness (she stepped into the breach on no notice and then made the whole project look great!).  Talented and nice people rock, I must say - kind of the theme of generosity displayed by all the poets who join in, too, and to whom I'm incredibly grateful.

And as always... thanks to all of you, because without you, we'd be writing in a vacuum (though we'd surely all still be writing!).

I'm really looking forward to the month ahead, and I hope you'll join in the fun. Questions? Comments? Let me know! And if not... sit back, relax, and let's enjoy the poetry.