Founder
Margaret Chew Barringer
April 16, 1946 – March 21, 2026

Margaret Chew Barringer was a Philadelphia poet, filmmaker, and free-speech advocate. She grew up on a dairy farm in Wayne, PA, where a large extended family and her parents who read the Encyclopedia Britannica at the dinner table nurtured her lifelong love of history, literature, and spirited conversation.

In the early 1980s, after raising her daughter and studying part-time at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College, she co-founded the American Poetry Center in Philadelphia to bring Free Speech and the Spoken Word to audiences across Pennsylvania. Under her leadership, the organization coordinated a statewide Poetry Month that featured hundreds of events and became a successful model for what later evolved into National Poetry Month, now overseen by the Academy of American Poets.

Through the American Poetry Center, Ms. Barringer organized readings, classes, and international symposia that drew writers such as Allen Ginsberg, E.L. Doctorow, Joseph Brodsky, Susan Sontag, Marge Piercy, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and she traveled regularly to the Soviet Union to foster exchanges between American poets and the Union of Soviet Writers before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Her work with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and a 1‑800‑ALL‑MUSE hotline, helped bring poetry and live literary events to millions of people in the region each year.

As technology and media changed, she transformed the American Poetry Center into American INSIGHT, an educational nonprofit that uses film, digital storytelling, and self-learning to explore the history and values of Free Speech, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law.

As a part of the organization’s educational focus, she mentored generations of interns to “make history every day” through research and telling meaningful stories in their own voices. Under her guidance, the interns spent five years researching Violet Oakley’s 13 murals in the Governor’s Reception Room of the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building; and then in 2011, helped to develop the first Free Speech Film Festival, and its corresponding Free Speech Award for the best film.

The annual Free Speech Film Festival has since attracted filmmakers and films from or about over 90 countries around the world. Winning “Official Selection” films are added to a “Free Speech Storyline” that traces the struggle for liberty back to the Magna Carta in 1215, and to an online library of “Free Speech Films”.

As a follow-on to this experience, she created “Make History Every Day!”, a unique online, self-learning, and values-based personal development and advocacy course that helps students find their meaning and purpose in Democracy today.

A granddaughter of geologist Daniel Moreau Barringer and a descendant of colonial jurist Benjamin Chew, she took pride in preserving her family’s scientific, Quaker, and legal heritage, even as she championed contemporary artists and activists. She supported research into Benjamin Chew, who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Province of Pennsylvania before the American Revolution and subsequently became the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as the Rule of Law entered the Constitution of our new nation.

She also served as vice president of the Barringer Crater Company in Arizona, sat on arts panels in several states, and was recognized in Marquis Who’s Who as a noteworthy poet and filmmaker.

Ms. Barringer’s poems appeared in journals and anthologies in both the United States and Russia, reaching wide audiences on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. Friends and colleagues often described her as a force of nature who believed that storytelling—whether through verse, film, or public conversation—was essential to democracy and to individual courage in speaking out.

Ms. Barringer was passionate about living and teaching the democratic principles espoused in the Constitution and in making a positive difference in the lives of youth around the world. She dedicated her life to the missions of American Poetry Center and American INSIGHT with no remuneration except for the satisfaction of helping individuals speak out and to become more confident, informed, inspired, and engaged citizens

Contributions in her memory and to support the continuation of her important work may be made through the Donate page on this website.