Susan Polis Schutz

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Susan Polis Schutz is an American poet and producer of greeting cards. She was born in Peekskill, NY, in 1944. She is the mother of Jared Polis.

A longtime activist for women's rights and antiwar causes, she initially worked as a freelance writer. In 1971, she turned her hobby of writing poetry into a commercial venture by founding (with husband Stephen Schutz) the greeting card and poster company Blue Mountain Arts.

Schutz's poetry focuses heavily on themes of love, family, motherhood, trust, and gratitude. Her poems' simple language and unrhymed free verse give them an approachable and sincere quality. However, their predictable idiom, consisting mainly of straightforward declarations of strong emotions, has led some readers to deride them as being kitschy and cloying.

In addition to her poems published as greeting cards, Schutz is the author of several poetry anthologies, including "To My Daughter With Love on the Important Things in Life" (1986).

Schutz is the executive producer and director of the documentary film Anyone and Everyone. The film features the coming out stories of gay sons and daughters and their parents and premiered on KPBS public television in San Diego California in August 2007 before being scheduled to air on a number of other public television stations in the United States. ^[1]

Schutz and Blue Mountain Arts came to wider attention with the founding, in 1996, of the bluemountain.com web site. One of the earliest experiments with the electronic greeting card medium, the site was widely adopted by world wide web users. In 1999, the dot-com venture Excite@Home bought bluemountain.com in a deal valued at $780 million.^[2] The wild overvaluation of bluemountain.com became a notorious example of what were later seen as the excesses of the dot-com boom, and these excesses were underlined when bluemountain.com was sold again in 2001, this time to the firm American Greetings, for only $35 million in cash.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ Anyone and Everyone. About the Film. Retrieved on May 3, 2008.
^ Susan Glairon. "After 35 Years, Card Company Still on Top", Associated Press, January 20, 2006.
^ Michael Perrault. "Bluemountain.com Sold For $35 Million in Cash; Online Greeting Card Company Acquired by Cleveland Purchaser", September 14, 2001.