How to Make a Living as a Poet

How to Make a Living as Poet details how Gary Max Glazner and a diverse group of American scribes—including Sherman Alexie, Mary Karr, Naomi Shihab Nye, Paul Polansky and Beau Sia—found ways integrate poetry into their financial until they could do what many writers consider unthinkable: list their life’s passion on their tax forms.
Glazner should know. After selling the flower shop he owned for 18 years the champion of the 1998 Poetry Olympics worked as a poet-in-residence at a hotel (leaving 45,000 copies of his poems on guests pillows!), secured sponsorship to take 100 poets on an 8,000-mile tour of America and even got Pontiac to hire him to promote a new car. From the story of his own project using poetry to help Alzheimer’s patients to an interview on the nuts and bolts economics behind the world’s only “Poetry Diner,” Glazner details how creativity off the page can spark even new approaches to writing itself. From marketing ideas for how to break out of the “poetry ghetto” to the how’s and why’s of analyzing the economic impact of slam festivals, Glazner shows exactly how its possible to not just survive but thrive off one’s art.