Poems & Essays

Site Visits

Interviews with poetry editors of online publications.

Wendy Xu on Hyperallergic

I began curating poetry for Hyperallergic last year, the summer of 2016, taking over for former editor Joe Pan. The magazine was already a daily read for me, so I was excited when Joe asked me to step in—he's developing a place for fiction in the series, which excites me too. I publish original poetry and poetry-in-translation bi-monthly, each time paired with visual art that is selected in collaboration with Associate Editor Elisa Wouk Almino.

Michelle Tudor on wildness

When we were starting Platypus Press we realized we also had a desire to build something more accessible, something that a broader audience would be able to experience. This was around August 2015 and we released our first issue in the December.

Robin Richardson on the Minola Review

In the past few years the realities of gender disparity in literature and in North American culture at large have come to the forefront. Organizations like CWILA, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts have worked to calculate, illustrate, and disseminate the numbers regarding men and women in print and review, and have made it clear that men maintain a majority in almost all arenas.

Gale Marie Thompson on Jellyfish

The very first issue of Jellyfish came out in the Spring of 2009. At that point I had these colliding interests in both poetry and web design, and I can see now that I was looking for two things. First, I was desperate for a way to scratch some sort of creative itch.

Steve Castro on Public Pool

Public Pool was launched the week of AWP Los Angeles last year in April by DonCarlos Price and John Ebersole. It was started to bring all types of poets together in one place, including spoken word artists and even rappers. We wanted a place where all poets could promote their work and themselves, that is, a community for poets.

The Editors of 7x7 on 7x7

The idea for 7x7 came out of a lunch date in Los Angeles between myself and the writer Amy Bonnaffons. The two of us had befriended each other at NYU's MFA program where we bonded over our shared interests in collaboration and art. Over the course of our studies there, our conversations developed into a few collaborative projects—though the only one that saw completion was a zine called "Monsters," a kind of "picture book for adults" that featured watercolor paintings of various fantastical creatures by me and a bunch of three-line biographies of those beasts by Amy.

Daniel Brian Jones on Folder

It seemed a lot of poetry was going online. I started enjoying works which would, by the chance of their publication, appear in both print and online. On September 8th 2015 I sent a bunch of emails. I think by the next day Jeremy Allan Hawkins and I started putting some of his poems together. We presented his issue October 1.

Drew Scott Swenhaugen on Gramma

Gramma was created over a conversation in June of 2017 between William (Bill) True (Gramma's Publisher) and myself, Drew Scott Swenhaugen (Gramma's Managing Editor). Bill has been an arts advocate and art collector in Seattle for many years. Under the William and Ruth True foundation, Bill founded Western Bridge, a contemporary arts space that ran from 2004 to 2012.

Eloisa Amezcua on The Shallow Ends

Originally, during the summer of 2016, a friend and I had the idea of creating a website where three of our favorite things would collide: poetry, fashion, and visual art. I went ahead and bought the domain name for The Shallow Ends, but as we're both extremely busy (poets with full-time day jobs), we realized that we'd taken on too much.