Love the words. Following this motto — it’s what Dylan Thomas told his actors before we presented the premiere of Under Milk Wood — has allowed the Unterberg Poetry Center to become the place where writers meet their readers as indispensable colleagues.

Founded in 1939, the Poetry Center is where the community connects — through the voice of literature — to history and to what Tony Kushner has called “the clamorous, contentious, vital present moment.”

Onstage, online and in the classroom, we honor the past, rejoice in the present and ensure that there will always be a venue for “the poets and novelists of each new era, in their brio and innovative ingenuity, as they go on enthralling the next generation with manic literary yearnings all their own” (Cynthia Ozick).