Poets & Writers Magazine

1 month ago | pw.org | Serena Alagappan

The person behind the viral Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury, which has garnered more than 845,000 followers, says they started the page in 2016 “almost by accident.” When their father got sick that winter, the curator, who prefers to remain anonymous, began collecting poems in screenshots, taking pictures of pages in books that particularly moved them, and posting the poems on Instagram.

1 month 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.

1 month ago | pw.org | Emma Komlos-Hrobsky |Luciano Grigera Naón

subscribe by From the May/June 2025 issue ofPoets & Writers Magazine Celebration of new talent. Amplification of extraordinary voices on the margins. A will to push the boundaries of what writing can do and be. These are the missions of some of this summer’s notable opportunities for writers: unique awards that promise to showcase the talents of their winners. Here we take you behind the scenes to see how these contests are run, who they serve, and why they do what they do.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.