5 August 2026
I’m thrilled to announce that our inaugural Emerging Poetry Critics Program is live, as of the beginning of this month. All the way in pre-Covid times, Ilya Kaminsky, then Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech, invited me and Soham Patel, who was then our poetry and reviews specialist at GR, to join Tech’s collaboration with the Ledbury Emerging Critics Program, a UK scheme started in 2017 by Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar. Ever since, I’ve been inspired by this thing that Sarah and Sandeep built. This year we received an NEA grant to create our own program for offering mentorship and publication to promising early-career critics.
Current poetry and reviews editor Noah Baldino and I spent all summer discussing, dreaming, ideating, and conversing, and developing the logistics. We hope that the Emerging Poetry Critics Program will:
• Stimulate more publications of poetry book reviews;
• Encourage early-career poetry critics through material support and mentorship;
• Structure collaboration between multiple literary journals for more avenues for poetry criticism, which can enrich and extend the life of a book;
• Affirm criticism’s indispensability, not only as publicity but also as literature’s essential counterpart;
• Establish strong, ongoing support for poetry reviews and criticism so that poetry can have a more dynamic and robust presence in periodical publications;
• And foster institutional collaborations between literary journals to experiment with ways to share resources, vision, and publishing ventures.
We used a national nomination process to find exceptional candidates who could use clearer access to the world of public criticism. We are thrilled to have Sarah Ahmad and antmen pimentel mendoza as our fellows. We found amazing mentors—Sandra Simonds and Christopher Spaide—and partner journals—AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Zyzzyva—who match our commitment to making that access matter. Now, we’re ready to go. As we say here at GR, we make communities on and off the page, and public-facing literary criticism can do so in ways that no other type of writing can. Criticism is a reader meeting a writer for shared meaning-making that invites others in. We’re thankful for all of those who are participating with us (including you, who are following this program) with your support and enthusiasm.
Speaking of community and mentorship: please check out our special folio honoring Minnie Bruce Pratt. This fall we will be doing events with Sinister Wisdom, the publisher that recently reissued Pratt’s masterful book S/HE, at Charis Books & More in Atlanta, during the 2026 National Women’s Studies Annual Conference as well as at the Duke University Library, where Pratt’s papers are held. And in this issue, Kevin Wilson shares a beautiful story about faith and art. And Kaveh Bassiri shares translations of a modern master from Iran who writes about goods in wartime.
Out of the office:
• Congratulations to Jane Huffman for winning the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize with her poem “Almanac.” Judge Brian Teare describes Huffman’s poem as “a moving lyric sequence full of expert tonal modulations effected through surprising syntactical maneuvers, each one supported by rigorous yet subtle prosodic design.” Visit our website for Teare’s full citation as well as the list of finalists.
• For those in Athens, Georgia, we are excited for several fall events:
° We are partnering with the UGA Dance and Women’s and Gender Studies departments to bring Carol Gilligan to the Athens Public Library to read from her new novel on 8 October.
° On 23 October, we will be hosting Julia Elliott and Josh Garcia.
° We will be at the Burnaway Art Book and Zine Fair in Atlanta on 24 October.
° We will be having a grand GR x McSweeney’s event on 8 November. Come to hear McSweeney’s authors read, meet each of our teams, and perhaps pick up holiday gifts for the book-loving folks in your orbit.
G.M.
