Poetry4kids.com now has a new online store where you can purchase t-shirts, mugs, hats, and other products with your favorite Kenn Nesbitt book covers, illustrations, and more.

In addition, the store also has an MP3 player where you can hear samples of songs co-written by Kenn Nesbitt and performed by children's musician Eric Herman.

You'll find the store on our website at http://www.poetry4kids.com/store. Although there are just a few products on the store to start, I will be adding new products as time goes on (and as I publish new books). If you don't see what you are looking for, please drop me a line and let me know what you would like to see in the store.

At long last, you can now read Poetry4kids.com on your mobile browser. Poetry4kids now has a mobile edition that is optimized for cell phone browsers so you can read funny poems no matter where you are.

In addition to being a light, fast version of the Poems section of the website, the Poetry4kids mobile edition also includes audio links for many of the poems, letting you hear funny poems on your phone as well.

To try it out, just visit http://www.poetry4kids.com/m on your mobile phone or handheld computing device and let me know what you think. This is just a first stab at it, so if there are features you'd like to see on a mobile version of Poetry4kids, please feel free to let me know.

For the past year, I've had a feature on the website allowing you to receive Poems by Email. When you subscribe, you automatically receive a different poem from one of my books in your email each week. But I've gotten requests from people who would like to receive the new poems as I post them on the website.

You asked for it, and here it is. You can now subscribe to receive poems from my books each week, or new poems as I post them on the website, or both if you like.

To subscribe to the new poems list, visit the Poems by Email page on this website and enter your email address for "List #2 - Newest Poetry4kids.com Poems by Email." Sometimes you'll get new poems every day and sometimes it may be weeks between each poem. As I write them, they will appear in your email.

Regardless of which mailing list you subscribe to, you can unsubscribe at any time, and your email address will never be shared with anyone else.

Enjoy!

Whoops. I just discovered that I goofed when putting up this month's poetry writing contest on poetry4kids.com. I mistakenly entered the expiration date for the contest as 2004 instead of 2009, so the contest never appeared on the website. I've fixed this now, so if you've written an April Fool's Day poem for this month's contest, you can enter it now.

Please note: This it not to be confused with the Time for Kids Poetry Writing Contest, which is a separate contest that is running for this month only.

Some of you may have noticed that it's been a while since I updated the Poetry4kids.com funny poetry podcast. The reason is that, because of the way I set it up last year, it was too much work to maintain and update. Adding a new episode to the podcast would take at least an hour or two; time that I really didn't have.

So, rather than let it continue to languish, I decided to try again, and to come up with something that would not take so much of my time to keep up to date. I signed up with a new podcast host, and settled on a simpler format for the episodes themselves; one which requires less editing time.

If you haven't listened to the Poetry4kids.com podcast, or if you listened, but gave up when there weren't any new episodes, I'd like to invite you to try out the new and improved Poetry4kids.com podcast.

I just added a couple of new word games to the website, Word Drop and Word Ruffle, and I'm really excited about both of them.

Word Drop is sort of like a cross between Tetris and Bookworm, except with falling letters instead of blocks. The object of the game is to click on letters to form words; the longer the words, the more points you get.

Word Ruffle gives you a handful of letters, and your job is to form as many words as you can out of those letters.

I will continue to add new word games and poetry games to the website as I find them. Happy playing!

There isn't a week that goes by that I don't receive email from someone asking me to send them poems by email. As much as I would like to, I honestly can't keep track of everyone, and I wouldn't have time to send out all those emails every week. But I finally found a good solution!

I have now set up an automated system to send poems by email every week. To try it out, simply enter your email address in the "Poems By Email" block on the right side of the home page of poetry4kids.com. You will immediately receive an email with a verification link in it to ensure that you entered a valid email address. Click on this link and you will start receiving poems in your email; your first poem will come right away, and you will receive a different poem every week.

This new service is completely free, you can unsubscribe at any time, and your email address will remain totally private. I won't give or sell your email address to anyone, I won't send you spam, and I won't send you more than one poem each week.

So, go ahead! Give it a try. And feel free let me know what you think.

In addition to creating the new podcast, I have also begun sending out a monthly email newsletter. The newsletter lets readers know what I've been up to for the past month and provides information about my books, school visits, and more. Until now, I've only sent it to members of the website who wanted to receive it. If you are not a member of poetry4kids.com, but you would still like to receive the monthly newsletter, just visit the Newsletter page to sign up. If you change your mind, you can unsubscribe at any time.