W. Todd Kaneko

Send me your students’ poems! 🌸💫📖

Nomination details at link below.

🎉🎉🎉 Congratulations to the 2025 Lambda Literary Award Winner for Transgender Poetry: Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski! 🎉🎉🎉 @zefrrr.bsky.social @noemipress.bsky.social
#Lammys2025 #LammyAwards

the secret is that your poems get better because you had/have to keep working

and success is a spirit & craft blunter

(you don’t want folks lining up to to publish everything you write 💙)

Two poetry books and the BGSU sign.

A poetry book and the Waffle House sign.

What a blast, getting to visit BGSU to see my old friend and poetry co-conspirator Amorak Huey and his amazing students (championship edition) to talk about poetry. Now driving back to Michigan where I am going to hug my kids until they tell me to stop.

News outlets should be saying in every story about the coming shutdown that Republicans control both Houses of Congress. Senate Republicans can end the filibuster & pass the bill if they want to.

What Republicans want is for Democrats to share the blame when the cuts in this bill kill people.

Did you know we accept simultaneous submissions? Yes, we do! But ✨ please✨ withdraw your piece immediately if it’s accepted elsewhere. It makes our process easier!

Texas Tech Moves to Limit Academic Discussion to 2 Genders

“I’m emotionally shellshocked right now,” said one professor in the Texas Tech system. “What does it say about academic freedom? It says we don’t have it.” The professor spoke by phone from the inside of a car to avoid being overheard by colleagues.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

Blue ombre backgrouns with white wavelike lines and a collaged image of a woman's robed figure with haloes at her head and feet and streams coming from her outstretched hands in shades of blue, white, grey, red and black. Text reads: "I salvage a self, unrivered" from "Bloodline" Unrivered by Donna Vorreyer/Sundress Publications 2025

Are you thinking about treating yourself to a book today? Here is my weekly reminder that Unrivered is now in pre-orders at @sundresspub.bsky.social - on sale for the price of a couple of fancy coffees - AND if you order soon, this little broadside swag included.

tinyurl.com/4pj96v59

Teachers, parents, and people who know high school aged creative writers, The Weight Journal is open for submissions!

www.theweightjournal.com

Subbing my 2nd MS to University and Indie presses...what are your suggestions...preferably not prizes

Black Lawrence Press is a good one with good people at the helm.

"...and why am I not doing the things I need to make me happy, and better yet, now that I think of it, why am I not just a dog?"

Big love for this piece of writing by @mczyzniejewski.bsky.social in @lit-namjooning.bsky.social 💙💙💙

APPEAL Seth Landman I said yes but I felt this no in me I heard a train and it was gone I was waiting to talk and a voice said are you ok I said yes but there was a crying buzzing I am not I said and I explained the train and the hills behind it subtle nature painting everlasting love pouring rain blurring the world sometimes it is so clear you ask how many things are living in the fields I am all alone here I explained how everyone is and there was so much concern and crickets everywhere in Kansas City and Northampton, Massachusetts in the air in the folds of travel passing a flask in the white noise of the river at night I made a shape with my hands approximating the action of a popping seed a fern that folds the kind of beauty you have to pretend not to see hold your hand out move your feet everything is equalizing in the fields in the cellar settling in blood I'm not really here right now though I remember it was nice to walk with you hmmm it's so quiet out here tonight did I fail you in some way I asked

“the kind of beauty you have to pretend not to see”

Seth Landman
in Diagram

Guys, I could NOT be more excited to have a story published at Short Story, Long, and I honestly really love this story in a way that I think you love just a few stories you’ve written. Maybe it’s the encroaching nostalgia, maybe it’s just the fun I had with the form, but I hope you’ll read it!

Arthur Sze named 25th U.S. poet laureate Sze is a poet with a lot of acclaim — he's won the National Book Award, was a Guggenheim fellow and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He aims to promote interest in translated poetry in his new role.

25th U.S. Poet Laureate, first Asian American to hold this honor. A big hell yeah for Arthur Sze today!
www.npr.org/2025/09/15/n...

It's so hard to concentrate on the good in these overwhelmingly bleak times, but this new Split Lip Issue is truly one of our best ever. It arrives this Monday morning like a balm. Thank you for reading, supporting, and sharing this incredible work ❤️

“He let me drive the winding
canyon to Malibu. I let him unwind.

I loved being alive the winter I lay
so close to loving I thought I’d die.”
—Jessica Abughattas, “Love Lyric”
@uarkpress.bsky.social www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-sele...

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.

~ Ada Limón

We're between innings, so here, have the first page of my book.

The Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition is now open for unpublished chapbooks of poems or prose, 16-36 pages long! Open to writers at all stages—the winner receives publication, $500, and ten book copies.

For submission details and past winners, visit our site: buff.ly/SwRgCtH

Building Your Short Story Collection with Hannah Grieco and Amber Sparks | Old Town Books

DC friends: Last chance to register! Come hang with me and Amber Sparks tomorrow night!

www.oldtownbooks.com/events/30770...

There is, as of right now, no coverage of this protest on the WaPo website or in their @washingtonpost.com feed.

So, if you (you reading this) want people to SEE this protest, you must share it.

Ok so in case yall missed the memo like I did. David Lehman, series editor of Best American Poetry is a Zionist ass. Literally feel embarrassed that I wound up in this situation. I was literally the only person of color in a room of 50+ people. It was terrifying.
#poetry #bestamericanpoetry

For the longest time being selected for Best American Poetry has been a great honor for so many poets but I think it’s time we acknowledge that not being selected for Best American Poetry is probably just as big an honor. Free Palestine.

David Lehman is staunch & vocal, anti-Palestine Zionist and I won’t be touching his projects or supporting his new book and yes you should definitely search Best American Poetry blog post controversy and read about it yourself. I’ve posted one of his blog posts, now deleted, below.

Kaepernick by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

I love these two very different approaches to writing a poem about a public figure, one by Rita Dove about Billie Holiday and the other by Sasha Debevec-McKenney more glancingly about Colin Kaepernick. Is the public figure poem a subgenre? If so or if not so, I’m on the lookout for more examples.

Today is the 7th birthday of my first book, American Radiance. I’m so proud of these unapologetically sad and goofy poems, and am going to post a few of them to celebrate.

If sadness were a fruit
it would be a sadberry
which is related to the blueberry
but sadder.

One of my favorites in this book! Happy birthday!