HOW WE BEGAN: To get submissions of poems for Volume 1 of The Great American Poetry Show we purchased Poets&Writers mailing list and sent out 5,000+ postcards calling for submissions. And we placed ads calling for submissions in several prominent poetry magazines such as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Poets&Writers. We started reading submissions in August 2002 and we finished in June 2004. We read over 8,000 poems from over 1,400 poets and we accepted 113 poems from 83 poets amounting to less than 2% of the total poems submitted. In November 2004, Thomson-Shore, in Dexter, Michigan, printed and shipped to us 1,000 hardcover copies of Volume 1 of The Great American Poetry Show which we officially published in January 2005.