Susan Polis Schutz


Susan Polis Schutz is an American poet and co-founder of greeting card and book publisher Blue Mountain Arts. She is the mother of Governor of Colorado Jared Polis.

Life and career

Schutz was born in Peekskill, New York, and is the daughter of June and David Polis. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. 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 web users. In 1999, the dot-com venture Excite@Home bought bluemountain.com in a deal valued at $780 million. The 1999 price paid for bluemountain.com became an example of what was later seen as the excesses of the dot-com bubble: the website was sold again in 2001, to greeting card company American Greetings, for just $35 million in cash.
Schutz is the executive producer and director of the documentary film Anyone and Everyone. The film featured 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.
She has two grandchildren through her son Jared and son-in-law Marlon Reis.