Jump to navigation Skip to content
Penguin and the National Basketball Association (NBA) recently teamed up to launch a literacy campaign featuring the retired Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Ray Allen of the Seattle SuperSonics, Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, and Becky Hammon of the New York Liberty, a team in the Women's National Basketball Association.
As marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, the thirty-four-year-old independent publisher of poetry in Port Townsend, Washington, I am required to read a lot. While most of the titles on my reading list are poetry collections, I recently read two nonfiction texts that got me thinking about the "economics" of creative writing.
In response to its 2004 report "Reading at Risk," which found that significantly fewer people read serious literature now than in years past, the National Endowment for the Arts recently launched an ambitious program designed to reverse the trend.
The UN has declared the next ten years the UN Literacy Decade. During this period the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization will initiate its "International Plan of Action," designed to mobilize national governments, public and private organizations, universities, and local communities to create literacy programs, research who will most benefit from such programs, and find ways to monitor their success so that they can be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.
