 He founded the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the New School in 1996, with concentrations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing for children/young adults.He directed the Graduate Writing Program and taught poetry and nonfiction writing workshops and literature seminars from 1996 until 2013, when he moved to Chicago to serve as President of the Poetry Foundation.Polito identified the distinctive characteristics of the New School Graduate Writing program as including "the finest and most various group of faculty writers in the country" and a public reading series of nearly fifty events each semester, sometimes on-sponsored with other New York literary organizations, such as the Academy of American Poets, the National Book Foundation, PEN America Center, Cave Canem, and the Poetry Society of America.