by Dana Guthrie Martin

After doing the Herculean job of managing the Read Write Poem site for the past one and one-half years, Deb Scott is stepping away from the management role to focus on her own work, as she mentioned in her post last week.

In her new role, she will be the news manager, making sure all the latest participant and poetry news is fresh every week on the site and in your RSS feeds, as well as continuing to provide feedback and contributions on a managerial level as her time allows. Deb has helped this community thrive and has done an amazing job as its manager. We are all indebted to her and should give her a huge round of applause for her work, as well as her continued involvement with the community. Thank you so much, Deb.

As the community’s founder, I am stepping back in as director. I’ve created a community management team that includes Dave Jarecki — a poet and writer who lives in Portland, Ore., and participates in Read Write Poem — and Nathan Moore — a Columbus, Ohio, poet who participates in Read Write Poem and acted as a contributor in fall 2008.

And we wouldn’t be able to do most of what we’re hoping to embark on without the support and vision of Read Write Poem’s new technology director, Andre Tan. Andre is a web architect who has expertise in building social networks so people with similar interests can share their work and communicate with one another. Under Andre’s direction, we are exploring ways to bring social media functionality (such as message boards, chat, email, profile pages and microblogging) to Read Write Poem to make this community even more dynamic and vibrant. We plan to roll that functionality out within the next few weeks or months.

I know the community will flourish with these phenomenal poets and leaders involved, and I am thrilled with the ideas we have already discussed about enriching Read Write Poem and strengthening this community. To learn more about each member of the community management team, please take a look at the new Brought to You By page.

In the meantime, we have some new ideas for columns and feature articles that we plan to start folding into the mix between now and the fall. Expect to see the first of those new elements in July, when two new columns dedicated to poetry books and chapbooks will start running. The site’s contributors — who we are thrilled to have continue writing for us — are Jessica Fox-Wilson, January O’Neil, Carolee Sherwood and Jill Wickham.

All of these women have been writing for and supporting Read Write Poem since its inception. (In fact, Carolee and Jill helped launch the new site back in 2007.) They have each brought thoughtful, meaningful writing and discussions to the project — as well as being an inspiration to everyone in the community. Please take a look at the Brought to You By page to learn more about them, if you haven’t already.

Other ideas we are kicking around include podcasts, a contest (with small prizes!) judged by Read Write Poem community members, a yearly print-on-demand anthology containing poetry that participants have written in response to Read Write Prompts, and a mechanism for creating critique groups and other subgroups tailored to the specific interests of community members.

We are also in the process of lining up guest poets to write prompts the first week of every month. These prompts will be written by established and emerging poets — in short, they are all poetry rock stars. We are thrilled to be able to bring their writing ideas to this community and give you the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by them all. We plan to run the first of these guest prompts the first week in July.

We are making one more change, starting in June, that you should be aware of: We are folding the Read Write Image and Read Write Word prompts back into the Friday prompt lineup. We felt it was too confusing to have participants responding to more than one prompt each week and that the community was losing something by not all responding to the same piece. Therefore, we decided to slate the second and fourth Fridays of the month for Read Write Word and Read Write Image prompts, respectively.

So you will still get your Wordle and Image prompts; they just won’t be on the Monday schedule anymore. As we mentioned, the first Friday of the month will be by a guest poet. Rounding the prompt lineup out on the third Friday, one of the community managers or contributors will provide the prompt.

Before wrapping up, I want to take a moment and thank several contributors who have decided not to continue writing for Read Write Poem.

Christine Swint wrote countless prompts and articles, and she dedicated a great deal of energy to helping provide prompts each day in April for Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo festivities. Her pieces illustrate her compassion, awareness and gentle spirit. (She also provided a lot of back-of-house support.) Juliet Wilson took time out of her hectic writing and editing schedule to share prompts that were engaging and accessible to writers at all levels. Tom Adam found time during his studies to share prompts and amazingly thorough pieces about poetic forms. We will miss each of their contributions and wish them well with their future writing.

As always, we are interested in your feedback. Please let us know what ideas you have for the site and any other feedback you have by emailing us at info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org. We might not be able to implement every idea that comes across our desk, since time constraints and budget come into play, but we definitely want to hear any and all ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has made this community what it is, and thank you for being patient as we transition and move forward.