Take Your Poet to Work Day: Tania Runyan

Summer is one of the happiest seasons at Tweetspeak Poetry, because it is the season of Take Your Poet to Work Day (or, you know, to the beach). It’s one thing to start every day with a poem (we recommend it). But how great would it be to start your day with a poet? On Take Your Poet to Work Day, we encourage people around the world to take their favorite poet to work for the day.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming!

We celebrate Take Your Poet to Work Day on the 3rd Wednesday in July. In 2020, that’s July 15. To help you play and celebrate with us, release new poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox.

We started our celebration seven years ago, and have been adding poets ever since. This year, you can bring Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, and Tania Runyan (our only living Take Your Poet to Work poet, and this year’s official Tweetspeak Poet Laura).

You can choose your poet from our full collection:

Because you can never have too many poets in your lunch box (or your desk drawer), we also do a school-year celebration in April—Take Your Poet to School Week—with some favorites for the younger (and younger-at-heart) poetry readers: Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson and the always delightful Mother Goose.

Take Your Poet to Work: Tania Runyan

Download your own Tania Runyan Take Your Poet to Work Day Printable

Tania Runyan is an American poet and the author of several poetry collections including What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007.

A sought after teacher and workshop leader, Runyan’s guides How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a College Application Essay are used in classrooms across the country.

Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Saint Katherine Review, and the Paraclete book Light upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. 

Runyan was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. In 2020, she was named the inaugural Poet Laura at Tweetspeak Poetry, thus becoming the first living poet to make an appearance on a Take Your Poet to Work Day stick. She plays fiddle and mandolin and gets lost in her Midwestern garden.

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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

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