He described the reading series as "honoring the 'public intellectual' traditions of the New School" and as a "community resource for writers and readers across the city." In 2006, Polito created the Riggio Writing & Democracy Honors Program at the New School. Named for Len and Louise Riggio, funders of the program, Writing & Democracy is a "progressive undergraduate program of writing workshops and close reading seminars that operates along the seams of Orwell's 'special connection' between writing and democracy." The program "seeks to merge study and practice, the aesthetic and political" and "is rooted in a supposition that we live inside a culture that assumes as citizens we don't pay close attention to much of anything, assumes—in fact—we don't know how." Alongside traditional and contemporary literature and culture, Polito saw the Internet as "axial to the Writing & Democracy Program, for both everyday practice and overall design. ... as a result of the omnipresence of the Internet the ordinary experience of the ordinary global citizen more and more resembles life inside a Modernist novel or poem—from Melville and Dickinson to Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Beckett, and Pound. The once radical innovations of Modernist literature—unreliable narrators, multiple voices, fragmentation, collage, ricocheting allusions, and instabilities of language and identity—now are the routine givens of our daily online life, whether at home or the office, our public or private selves." Riggio faculty included Greil Marcus, Lynne Tillman, Elizabeth Gaffney, Catherine Barnett, John Reed, Sam Tanenhaus, and René Steinke, who also served as faculty advisor to the program's magazine,"12th Street". At the New School, Polito also founded ASHLAB, a digital mapping of poet John Ashbery's Hudson, New York house in light of his written work. Polito team-taught an ASHLAB graduate seminar with digital designer Irwin Chen and poets Tom Healy and Adam Fitzgerald. In January 2013, it was announced that Polito was selected as the second President of the Poetry Foundation, succeeding John Barr. Soon after the announcement, Meghan O'Rourke reported that Critics argue that the [Poetry] foundation, led by an investment banker and poet named John Barr, hasn't spent its money wisely or aggressively enough. Among its most visible projects to date are a Web site that draws some 12 million unique visitors a year; a high-school recitation program; a redesign for Poetry magazine; and, most contentiously, an eyebrow-raising $21.5 million headquarters in Chicago.