Poets & Writers Magazine

Poets & Writers Magazine stands out as the premier publication for creative writers. Starting as a quarterly newsletter with just a few hundred copies, it has evolved to focus on key topics relevant to writers, such as securing an agent and marketing their books. Published every two months, the magazine features insightful essays about the literary world, highlights contemporary authors, and offers the most extensive catalog of literary grants, awards, deadlines, and winners found in print. Each edition reaches over 100,000 writers.

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Threads, Thrumming: A Profile of Kevin Wilson

1 week ago | pw.org | Kate Tuttle

In Kevin Wilson’s fifth novel, Run for the Hills, forthcoming in May from Ecco, a quartet of half-siblings, strangers to one another, join up to embark on a cross-country road trip to California to confront their father, who over the years had left each of them in turn to form a new family. Charles Hill, the absent father, is a man with “no anchor,” Wilson says.
The Sad Tale of the Soft Sale: How Book Returns Work and Why You Should Care

1 week ago | pw.org | Luke Hankins

Ten years ago I founded Orison Books, a nonprofit literary press in Asheville, North Carolina, with a unique mission to publish exceptional literary work that engages the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. At the time, I had experience as a published author and as a literary magazine editor, but I didn’t understand the complexities of book distribution.
Undocupoets Turns Ten

1 week ago | pw.org | Alissa Greenberg

When Janine Joseph called fellow poet Esther Lin one afternoon in March 2017 to give her the good news that she had been awarded a $500 Undocupoets fellowship, one of three annual grants given to poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States, neither expected the conversation to last long. Instead they talked for an hour about their shared experiences dealing with the challenges of living undocumented in the United States.
Double Dreaming, Double Imagining: A Profile of Douglas Kearney

1 week ago | pw.org | Destiny O. Birdsong

It is less than forty-eight hours after Super Bowl LIX and the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance (not to mention the Philadelphia Eagles’ blowout over the heavily favored Kansas City Chiefs) when I sit down for a Zoom interview with Douglas Kearney, an award-winning poet, performer, professor, and author of nine books, including the poetry collection I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, published by Wave Books in April.
A Writer’s Home, a Writer’s Voice: Finding Inspiration in Literary Pilgrimages

3 weeks ago | pw.org | Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

At the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, visitors step directly into the private haven where the poet wrote with such incendiary vision.
Following the Sounds of Poetry

2 months ago | pw.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham

There are multiple pathways from Anne Carson’s poetry to Ross Gay’s prose. One need only listen, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson reminds us, and follow the trail of audience participation, decolonization, and ants. In August 2024 the center announced the complete transcription of Voca, the audiovisual archive of its poetry recordings, including its longtime reading and lecture series, which began in 1962.
Literary MagNet: Greg Schutz

2 months ago | pw.org | Dana Isokawa

subscribe by From the March/April 2025 issue ofPoets & Writers Magazine Seventeen years ago, Greg Schutz was sitting in a laundromat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, waiting for the spin cycle to end, working on a short story that he had been struggling with for weeks. He decided to rewrite a scene from a secondary character’s perspective, and “the story unlocked itself,” he says. “New sources of conflict emerged, strange points of tension between two ways of seeing the same situation.
What’s Left Out: The Poems That Haunt a Collection From the Outside

Dec 11, 2024 | pw.org | Maria Zoccola

At a dinner table packed with writers and book people at the 2024 Western Carolina University Spring Literary Festival, held in April in Cullowhee, North Carolina, the cofounder of Gold Leaf Literary, Lauren Harr, told me that what she finds most interesting about a poetry collection is what has been left out of it. The maybe-poems, she meant. The almosts. The poems dropped on the floor early in the editing process, even before the manuscript is sent to contests and open reading periods.
How the Light Gets In: The Firefly

Dec 11, 2024 | pw.org | Aimee Nezhukumatathil

It is no secret that I’m a summer gal. I adore the bevy and bounty of stone fruit and sun-drenched gardens, pool splashes from my teen sons, so much green and bloom and chirp in the thick canopy of trees arched above me. But in a season of shorter days and dark nights when I, too, want to overwinter like bumblebees, brown bears, and wood frogs—I look to my favorite summer creature, the firefly, to help guide the way to a path of renewed inspiration. Electrified, even.
The Black List Seeks Next Great Novel

Dec 11, 2024 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

The origin story of the Black List is almost mythic: In 2005, film development executive Franklin Leonard sent an anonymous survey to every Hollywood producer he had met with that year, asking them to name their favorite screenplays they’d passed on during the year because the scripts didn’t match their needs.