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One poet’s personal reading goal gone viral, the Sealey Challenge invites participants to read a book of poetry every day in August and to share their reading lists publicly, offering sustained immersion in poetry and its community.
The 2025 Off Topic Writers’ Conference will be held online on August 9 and August 10. The conference features craft talks, panels, and workshops for poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. The faculty includes poet, fiction writer, and creative nonfiction writer Murgatroyd Monaghan and fiction and creative nonfiction writers Finnian Burnett and Chanel M. Sutherland. Poet Duncan Mercredi and fiction writer Michelle Butler Hallett will deliver the keynote addresses. The cost of the conference is $120 (or can be priced on a sliding scale based on financial need).
Off Topic Writers’ Conference, 10 Marble Avenue, Paradise, NL A1L 0T3, Canada. Marion Lougheed, Off Topic Publishing Founder and Editor.
A prize of €1,000 (approximately $1,118); publication by Southword Editions, Munster Literature Centre’s publishing imprint; and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry
Based in North Carolina, the independent publisher Blair champions local narratives, overlooked stories, and perspectives outside of traditional publishing. The press publishes ten to twelve books yearly in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
To write their latest book, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press, 2025), Tom Comitta used data compiled from a specially designed national public opinion poll on literary preference and composed two novels: a formulaic, fast-paced thriller and an experimental epistolary sci-fi romance with elderly aristocratic tennis players as protagonists. Responses to the poll included preferences and aversions to attributes such as characters’ identities, genre, verb tense, setting, and point of view. Taking a cue from this project, jot down a brief list of what you would guess to be the most and least desired attributes of poetry, including rhyme, length, diction, and imagery. Write a “Most Wanted Poem” and “Most Unwanted Poem” based on your list. How do your own idiosyncrasies and thoughts around literary taste infiltrate each piece?
The author of Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025) encourages writers to consider how music albums are introduced as they craft the beginning of poetry collections.
CD Eskilson celebrates the release of their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), in this reading and conversation with poets Ashia Ajani and Preeti Vangani at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.
The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.
In this Button Poetry video filmed at SubText Books in Saint Paul, Danez Smith reads their poem “Dede was the last person i came out to,” which appears in their fourth collection, Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024).
