Editor Interview: Sho Poetry Journal

An eclectic stew.

We enjoy much of the poetry published in The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, The Common, Wildness, and many, many more. We love holding Salt Hill in our hands and admire the attention and care the editors of ONLYPOEMS give to each Poet of the Week. Publishers we admire include Bull City Press, Black Lawrence Press, and Alice James Books.

Dominique's favorite poets and writers include Li-Young Lee, Ama Codjoe, Tarfia Faizullah, Jill Osier, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin.
Johnny's favorite poets and writers include Adrian C. Louis, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Li Po, and Ryokan.
Our shared favorites include Leila Chatti, Natalie Diaz, Dorianne Laux, Sharon Olds—as well as many of the poets we’ve published in our pages.

We publish an odd assortment of poets and poems. We try to work with promising young artists to create striking cover art that's in conversation with the poems in that issue. We put a lot of time and effort into supporting our contributors. At present, all of the work we publish is unsolicited. Finally, whenever we're able to, we spend a lot of our personal time typing up feedback on submissions—usually but not exclusively for promising new/early-career poets.

We appreciate it when submitters have purchased and read previous issues of Sho, but we understand that this isn’t feasible for everyone. We have a new feature on our website called "Read a Poem" and have also posted many audio features to our website and to our Instagram feed. We also link to Sho poems that were featured in Verse Daily.
General advice for submitting to any publication:
– Read the submission guidelines.
– Remember that poetry editors are usually often poets.
– Don’t take rejections personally.

The ideal submission follows guidelines (and understands why they exist) and lets the work speak for itself.

Here are some submitter mistakes we’ve encountered:
– Submitting to the wrong project/portal;
– Sending unsolicited revisions after submitting;
– Assuming that we are a Japanese-themed journal;
– Not including their name on their manuscript.

We recommend keeping cover letters clear and relatively short. If the poet is submitting work from a manuscript, we like to be given some context.
Publication credits can be interesting but don’t play a part in our decision-making process. That said, we do give extra attention to promising new poets with no publishing credits.

We like to read and return to submissions over the course of two weeks. If none of the poems are a fit but pique our interest anyway, we sometimes look up the poet and read their other published work. We sit with some submissions longer than others.

We have a very small masthead, which consists of two editors and one editorial assistant, Claire, whose opinion carries as much weight as ours. At Sho, the editors are the first readers. Claire is assigned submissions that we have both read and advanced to the next stage. Some people do withdraw poems rather rapidly, so we read and make decisions on a rolling basis.
As a relatively new journal with a limited budget, we’re still getting the word out there. We aren’t inundated with submissions, which means that the submissions we do receive get a careful read. In the past, we’ve included personal feedback with submissions that caught our interest or came close, but that can be tricky. Not everyone wants feedback. Some people get offended. It's also not sustainable for us, given our 30-day response time. Still, sometimes we do include feedback.
Between reading periods, we produce the journal. We read all the poems we’ve accepted, put them in order, typeset them, send proofs to contributors, work with our cover artist, design the cover, get it to print. Then, close to the release date, we get in touch with contributors who might want to order extra copies of the journal at a discount, start taking pre-orders. When it arrives, we mail everything out ourselves.
We also devote much of our time to promoting Sho contributors, creating audio features to showcase individual poets, and make efforts to promote their work on social media. It can be exhausting, but it’s worth it. We are excited by the work that crosses our path.

It varies. We will sometimes ask questions or make suggested edits to a poem, but the author has the final say. We do not encourage last-minute edits. Everyone receives at least one round of proofs before we go to print.

Yes. We nominate work for Best New Poets, The Pushcart Prize, and Best Spiritual Literature. We also submit a copy of each issue to venues such as Verse Daily. Work that first appeared in Sho has been chosen for inclusion in Best Spiritual Literature and republished in Verse Daily.