If you're the person who blurts out "I'm a poet and I didn't even know it," whenever anything related to poetry pops up in conversation, or if you've ever uttered the even more brazen of the well-worn poetry phrases — "Poetry is dead" — keep reading.

But this should serve as a reminder that there are lots (and lots, and lots) of poets that you should be reading, whether you've read much poetry in the past or not. .

The poets below, all highlighted by the Poetry Foundation, have vastly shaped the writing landscape in the U.S., transforming words and lives in the process.

Suggested reading: Start with their viral reading of "dear white america," and then move to their collection, Don't Call Us Dead (2017), a National Book Award finalist. .

Suggested reading: Total spoiler alert for another poet on this list, but Madhubuti's poem, "Gwendolyn Brooks," is not to be missed.

(She's also edited a book, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), to help shift the lack of black poets in nature poetry anthologies.) ?

Suggested reading: For those new to Dungy's work, try her collection Smith Blue (2011), a finalist for a Poetry Society of America award.

The Poetry Foundation calls her "one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry," and she has the accolades to prove it: Brooks was the first black author to to win the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the first black woman to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now called United States Poet Laureate)

Suggested reading: Again, it's Gwendolyn Brooks

Suggested reading: For an expansive career like Dove's, start with Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (2016), a collection that won the NAACP Image Award in 2017, and was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. 

Suggested reading: There's a plenty to pick from, but his poem "Malcolm X, February 1965," available here via the Poetry Foundation, remains especially haunting. 

To keep finding other poets to read, you can browse the Poetry Foundation's website, where you can find more information about even more poets, like Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, and June Jordan, as well as a treasure trove of poems.