Launching the Correspondence Program

This week, the high school students participating in the Poetry Correspondence Program will start receiving their Langston Hughes books. We’re looking forward to getting things underway. Last year was an important pilot, so now we are even more prepared to implement the program.

We have more letter-writers—some new and some experienced. We have expanded the number of young people we will correspond with over the course of the year, and we have plans to share more poems with complementing photographs with them.

Thanks to generous assistance from the Meridian Society, an Illinois-based group of philanthropic women, all 200-plus high school and middle school students participating in the program will receive free Vintage Hughes books. We’re especially excited about making those materials available to the students. People of all ages rarely receive or purchases volumes of poetry. So hopefully, we’re making a useful, poetic intervention.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the program.