Staff

Editor
Rachel Contreni Flynn
Kirun Kapur

Operations Manager
Aumaine Rose Smith

Associate Editor
Asa Drake

Editorial Board
Rachel Contreni Flynn 
Leonore Hildebrandt
Jessica Jacobs
Kirun Kapur
Sophia Stid

Visiting Editor
Taylor Byas
Chloe Martinez

Senior Readers
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Carrie Green
Frederick Speers

Foundation Board
Rachel Contreni Flynn 
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Kirun Kapur
Arden Levine
Oliver E. Payne

Supporting Staff
Patrick Flynn

Address correspondence to:
Beloit Poetry Journal
P.O. Box 1450
Windham, ME 04062

Email:
bpj@bpj.org

Mission

Our longstanding mission is to seek out and share work of fresh and lasting power, poems that speak startling, complicated, necessary truths and that do so in surprising and beautiful ways. Since 1950, the BPJ has cleaved to a set of editorial practices that enable discovery of vibrant new voices and that foster long-lasting relationships with some of the most gifted, important poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Our aim is to offer work that pushes boundaries of content, aesthetic, and form—to showcase what’s becoming of contemporary poetry—and we do so the old fashioned way. Senior staff read each submission thoroughly and openheartedly; when a poem moves, informs, and inspires us, we forward it to the entire editorial board, a group of about a half dozen skilled volunteer readers. These readers weigh in, and what continues to engage the group comes with us to the next biannual editorial board meeting.

At these three-day sessions, we bunk in together, take our meals together, read poems aloud, and discuss their merits until we’ve selected an issue from among the most finely wrought, revelatory, and world-aware poems in the set. This process forces us to read with the closest possible attention, to articulate our appetites and judgments clearly and convincingly, and to take the kinds of risks a single editor might wind up talking herself out of.

As a result, we’re known for publishing long poems other journals won’t make space for. We’re known for publishing formally challenging poems, for printing the brutally honest and the unparaphrasable alongside the wryly funny, and lyrics that ring clear as bells. As a staff, we’re convinced there’s no other method by which the BPJ could remain so urgent, so eclectic, and so bold. Whatever other changes we embrace, we’re steadfastly committed to the editorial practice that has proven itself with issue after issue for over 70 years.