Best Poetry Literary Magazines in 2026

Print magazine for Poetry,

West Branch is a twice-yearly magazine of poetry and fiction, published by Bucknell University.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

The Missouri Review is based at the University of Missouri and publishes four issues each year. Each issue contains new fiction, poetry and essays. We also run author interviews and found-text features where we print never before published works such as a short story by William Faulkner or one of Tennessee Williams' plays.

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Online magazine for Poetry,

Sky Island Journal is an independent, international, free-access literary journal. We publish accomplished, well-established authors—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Our mission is to provide our over 100,000 readers in 145 countries with a powerful, focused, advertising-free literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

Confrontation Magazine began operation in 1968 with the mission of bringing new talent to light in the shadows cast by well-known authors. Open to all submissions, each issue contains original work by famous and by lesser-known writers.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

Let the power of your imagination be your guide. We're interested in stories, essays, and poems that speak to this idea of Transcendence.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

Hayden’s Ferry Review looks for well-crafted work that takes risks, challenges readers, and engages us emotionally and artistically. A small portion of our publication is solicited from established authors, while the majority of our contributors are chosen from the thousands of manuscripts we receive each year.

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Online magazine for Poetry,

The Incandescent Review is an entirely non-profit, teen-run literary magazine, and our team hails from across the globe: from San Jose to Shanghai, from Atlanta to Athens. Our purpose is to create a platform for teens and young adults to express their opinions and emotional response to world issues in the form of poetry, prose, visual art, and more.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

Copper Nickel, the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver, was founded by poet Jake Adam York in 2002. Work published in Copper Nickel has appeared in the Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has been listed as notable in the Best American Essays anthology.

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Print & Online magazine for Poetry,

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to their times.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

The Chicago Quarterly Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal publishing the finest short stories, poems, translations and essays by both emerging and established writers. We're proud to have had work from our pages chosen for Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology as we continue our mission to stimulate, entertain, and inspire.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

The Oxford American is a nonprofit, quarterly literary magazine dedicated to featuring the best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Over its quarter century, the Oxford American has won four National Magazine Awards — including an award for General Excellence in 2016.

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Print & Online magazine for Poetry,

Boulevard's mission is to publish the finest in contemporary fiction and poetry as well as definitive essays on the arts and culture, and to publish a diversity of writers who exhibit an original sensibility.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

We like stories that start quickly and have a strong narrative arc. Poems that are passionate about subject, language, and image are welcome, whether they are traditional or experimental, whether in formal or free verse (closed or open form). We publish all forms of creative nonfiction, from personal narrative to lyric essay to immersive journalism; we appreciate when an essay moves beyond the personal to tell us something new about the world.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

Each issue of Ecotone brings together the literary and scientific, the personal and biological, the urban and rural. Much of the writing we publish addresses the idea of place: overlapping habitats both real and aesthetic.

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Print magazine for Poetry,

The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country's premier literary journals. More than one-hundred short stories, poems, and essays first published in The Gettysburg Review have been reprinted in the various prize anthologies. Online submissions are $3 and snail mail submissions are free!

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