May/June 2025

In the hostile climate of the current U.S. administration, queer authors persevere through writing and community building, continuing a culture of resistance and defiance that is radically, emphatically, grounded in joy and love.

The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate and Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka. 

In the past decade, the Undocupoets advocacy organization has greatly increased undocumented poets’ visibility as meaningful voices in American poetry. The group plans to push forward in community against the difficulties to come.

In response to the unauthorized use of books to train large language models, the developers of Created by Humans propose a solution: negotiation between authors and AI companies to help writers control how their work is used.

An introduction to three new anthologies, including What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence and Sing the Truth: The Kweli Journal Short Story Collection.

Publishing two poetry books a year, Conduit Books shares the quirky aesthetic of its journal counterpart, Conduit. The press seeks work that is innovative, honest, and sincere, bringing people to poetry and rumination.

The author of Late to the Search Party highlights magazines that have offered his lithe, intimate poems a home, including Waxwing and Split Lip Magazine. 

Inspired by the possibility of providing complete strangers an opportunity for creativity and catharsis, the Unsent Letter Mailbox started as an interactive urban art project and has now grown into a salon reading series.

As the Common celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, founder and editor in chief Jennifer Acker delves into the thinking behind creating a literary organization and magazine devoted to place.

Write a poem that uses the language of flowers to share a secret, a scene where a young person expresses their thoughts about a parental figure, or an essay based on the logic of your own dreams.

An immigrant novelist reflects on the opportunities extended to her by the American publishing industry—and challenges the notion that she should be grateful to be given any kind of welcome.

A novelist describes her exposure to a multitude of scientific disciplines as the writer-in-residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and shares how exploring something completely new has lent fresh energy to her work.