Grantee-Partner Profile

Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Poet Lore 

Poet Lore is a biannual print journal published with the conviction that poetry provides a record of human experience as valuable as history.

Originally Published: July 24, 2026
Six issues of Poet Lore lying atop each other. The covers have a circle presented in an array of colors with Poet Lore in the center.

Photo courtesy of Poet Lore.

Mission: Since its debut issue over 130 years ago, Poet Lore has been a space where poets from all over the world are put in conversation with one another. Our continued mission is to bring these urgent conversations to our pages and readers.

Poet Lore is a biannual print journal of poetry and translation. It was founded in Philadelphia in 1889 by Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke, two progressive young Shakespeare scholars who launched it as a forum on Shakespeare, Browning, and the comparative study of literature; they soon sought the original work of living writers and moved the operation to Boston. In 1976, The Writer’s Center (TWC), a literary arts nonprofit based in Bethesda, Maryland, purchased Poet Lore. Over the course of more than 130 years, Poet Lore has published world-famous poets and new writers side-by-side in its pages. 

Poet Lore embraces diversity, defining its constituency as broadly as possible. Executive director Emily Holland is a nonbinary lesbian poet, and guest editors are selected from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, and disabled poet communities. Each guest editor curates roughly 40% of their issue’s content by soliciting poems from their networks. Recent guest editors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Kenzie Allen, and jason b. Crawford.

Three adults standing behind a table with a purple and magenta cloth with Poet Lore and The Writer's Center in white letters. Books are displayed on the table.

Emily Holland, Brandon Johnson, and Amy Freeman represent Poet Lore and The Writer's Center at the 2026 Gaithersburg Book Festival. Photo courtesy of Poet Lore.

The journal regularly highlights voices from marginalized communities in the United States and worldwide, including, most recently, poets from China, India, and Nigeria. Poet Lore publishes primarily in English, but it also publishes translated poetry from a variety of languages outside the more widely translated Romance languages, including Arabic, Kurdish, and Maltese. 

Unlike many journals, Poet Lore welcomes long poems, sequences, lyric essays, and experimental forms alongside traditional forms and free verse. Its large-format issues, redesigned in 2019, allow editors to position multiple poems on one page to bring poems into conversation with one another. 

Quote: I discovered Poet Lore at the Brooklyn Book Festival when my middle school child picked up some of the magazine's recently published poems that had been printed onto postcards. A year later, when my own poem was published in the magazine, I thought again of the secret, beautiful way poems travel through the world to people who need them. I am grateful to Poet Lore for facilitating this magical connection between writers and readers of poetry.. Unquote.
— Emily Moore, contributor

Core to its mission are paying contributors $50 for each poem published, waiving reading fees, and accepting mailed submissions from those unable to submit online. Since implementing the payment program in 2022, Poet Lore and its contributors have been highlighted in online features at Chill Subs, Best American Poetry's "Pick of the Week," Verse Daily, and in print in the Best New Poets Anthology for several years in a row. Poet Lore also nominates poets it publishes for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets anthologies. 

Along with TWC, Poet Lore sponsors more than a dozen in-person and virtual poetry events year-round featuring acclaimed poets, including Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award recipients. Through strategic partnerships with partner organizations, Poet Lore continues expanding offerings beyond the print journal itself. Staff regularly attend the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference, Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections, and the Washington Writers Conference. 

General operating support from the Poetry Foundation has helped Poet Lore to continue offering free submissions and paying contributors $50 per poem, ensuring that the journal remains an accessible venue for poets of all economic backgrounds. This model has led to a record increase in submissions and subscriptions. As more print magazines close operations, financial support for Poet Lore, which remains the longest-running continuous publication of a poetry journal in the United States, keeps poetry alive in the cultural sphere. 

Connect with Poet Lore: