To my surprise, a columnist (Katie Haegele) from the Philadelphia Inquirer contacted me about the poem sparks I’ve been writing for Poets.org. Next thing I knew, there’s an article about them in the newspaper! Very cool. Check it out:

Her forum seeks to spark poetry, introduce poets’ to others work

From the article:

“Hmm.

I did some online searching and found a number of poetry Web sites, many with participatory forums. The one actually using the term Poem Spark was the discussion forum of Poets.org, the Web site of the Academy of American Poets.

The forum’s administrator is Christine Klocek-Lim, a poet and photographer who lives in northeastern Pennsylvania. At the time she joined the forum as a volunteer moderator in 2005, it offered things like listings of conferences and grants and a workshop in which writers post their work for critique by other participants.

“After looking at some other online workshops, I realized that many of them had exercises that they used to prompt the writing of new poems,” said Klocek-Lim. She wanted to add a feature like that, but didn’t want to use the term “exercise.”

So the Poem Spark was born.”