Founded in January 1889, Poet Lore is America’s oldest poetry journal. In its current form, Poet Lore is a biannual print journal of poetry, featuring the finest in contemporary writing. Each issue delivers poems that make concerns of our moment both urgent and intimate. Published with the conviction that poetry provides a record of human experience as valuable as history, Poet Lore’s intended audience is broadly inclusive.
Like that of Poet Lore’s founders, the continued mission is one of discovery.
Unlike most journals, Poet Lore welcomes long poems, sequences, lyric essays, and experimental forms alongside traditional forms and free verse. In this way, Poet Lore invites cover-to-cover reading, bringing diverse poems into conversation with one another. Our large-format issues, redesigned in 2019, allow us to position multiple poems on one page to invite readers to make connections between each poem.
Poet Lore’s reputation for discovery arises from its unique editorial culture: a commitment to considering each submission with care and engaging authors in a meaningful exchange. The goal is nothing less than offering its readers poems built to last.
In 2021, we reconfigured our masthead to bring on a new Guest Editor with every issue. With support from our Editor and editorial staff, each selected Guest Editor curates a folio of work for the issue with a theme or subject of their choosing. Our Guest Editors have revolutionized the way we build each issue and have brought new voices and poetic styles to our pages. Read our Guest Editor’s notes from past issues on our blog and check out our next Guest Editor’s call for submissions.
For more information on what we look for in submissions and our editorial vision, check out this interview at Frontier Poetry with our editor, Emily Holland.
Poet Lore is published in Bethesda, MD, by The Writer’s Center, a literary arts non-profit.