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POETRY submissions Are open

Shō Poetry Journal

Established in 2002, revived in 2023

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Shō Poetry Journal is a nonprofit print journal emerging from a 20-year hibernation. We publish an eclectic range of poetry twice a year and publish audio features on a rolling basis. We strive to champion voices that have been historically underrepresented or overlooked. Browse a list of our contributors and follow us on Instagram for updates.

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"Hopi Leia" relief print by Hopi artist Sikuyva Dawavendewa

FORTHCOMING ISSUE

Shō No. 8

winter 2025/2026

This issue features 72 poems by 48 poets: Sean Cho A. • Hiwot Adilow • Elisa Luna Ady • courtney alyce • Seth Amos • Jack B. Bedell • Shlagha Borah • Apollo Chastain • Lyn Li Che • Chen Chen • Stephanie Choi • Lindsay D’Andrea • Loisa Fenichell • Cheyenne C. Fletcher • Reuben Gelley Newman • Carlos Andrés Gómez • Iain Grinbergs • Shira Leah Haus • Sarah Jordan • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Aiman Tahir Khan • Sophie Klahr • Whitney Koo • Giljoon Lee • Elizabeth Loudon • Betsy Mitchell Martinez • Rebecca Morton • Lisa Mottolo • James O’Leary • Mollie O’Leary • william o’neal ii • Konstantinos Patrinos • Ngoc Pham • Jessica Nirvana Ram • Jemma Leigh Roe • Adrie Rose • Rukan Saif • SM Stubbs • Virgil Suárez • Will Summay • Tiezst “Tie” Taylor • Tianyi • Reed Turchi • Margaret Wack • Joey Wańczyk • Gwenyth Wheat • Ross White • Yan Zhang

Cover art: “Hopi Leia” by Sikuyva Dawavendewa.

Pre-order now
A girl in a long white dress and a bird head mask sits on a bough under a full moon in a night forest landscape. Her hands are folded in her lap and her feet can't be seen. Text says: Shō Poetry Journal No. 7 Summer 2025.

CURRENT ISSUE

Shō No. 7

SUMMER 2025

This issue features 67 poems by 48 poets, including:

– Christian J. Collier (Winner, Shō Poetry Prize)
– Aldo Amparán (Shō Poetry Prize Runner-Up)
– Ohia, Ernest Chigaemezu (Winner, Sita Martin Prize)
– Nina C. Peláez (Sita Martin Prize Runner-Up)

Cover art: “Interim” by Tanya Rastogi.

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Online Features

  • Dec 22, 2025

    Rukan Saif — Harami Ghazal [Sita Martin Prize Runner-Up]

  • Dec 21, 2025

    Carlos Andrés Gómez: Masked

  • Dec 20, 2025

    Chen Chen: That Time You Were Giggling, Giggling, Giggling

  • Dec 1, 2025

    Elizabeth Loudon: Renunciation

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Past Issues

Shō No. 6

Winter 2024/2025

Shō No. 6 features 57 poems by 40 poets.

Cover art: “In Gilded Walls” by Tanya Rastogi.

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Shō No. 5

Summer 2024

Shō No. 5 features 68 poems by 47 poets.

Cover art: “Lucy” by Harim Choi.

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Shō No. 4

Winter 2023/2024

Illustration of girl wearing a large deer head mask with antlers. She is clothed in a dark blue tshirt and pants and stands in a high desert landscape, holding plastic flowers. A ghostly girl’s head is placed beside her in the grass.

Shō No. 4 features 73 poems by 47 poets.

Cover art: “Girl with Deer Mask” by Harim Choi.

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Shō No. 3

Summer/Fall 2023

Shō No. 3 features 62 poems by 42 poets.

Cover art: “Grandfather Autumn” by Juanita Violini.

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Listen to “Harami Ghazal” by Rukan Saif, selected Listen to “Harami Ghazal” by Rukan Saif, selected as the runner-up for the Sita Martin Prize. “Harami Ghazal” appears in Shō No. 8 (Winter 2025/2026).

About this poem: Some of the most fun advice I received on form was to break into it. I find it really satisfying when a ghazal turns into/against itself and breaks its own rules while clearly still being a ghazal. When I was writing this poem, I was thinking a lot about faith, fracture, and return. I felt that the ghazal form allowed me to honor return with its repetition and circularity, while the refrain of "pray/prey" allowed me to study the connection between faith and fracture.

Rukan Saif is a poet and essayist from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, Faultline, The Penn Review, ONE ART, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net nominee, she reads for ONLY POEMS and has received generous support from Brooklyn Poets and The Seventh Wave. She now splits her time between Baltimore and Boston.

#ghazallovers #audiopoetry
We’re open and reading for our summer issue! #poe We’re open and reading for our summer issue!

#poetrysubmissions #shoreviewfolder
We’re thrilled to share another sneak peek from ou We’re thrilled to share another sneak peek from our forthcoming winter issue, Shō No. 8. Here’s Carlos Andrés Gómez reading “Masked.”

About this poem: Until poetry gave me permission toward an expansive embrace of paradox that allowed me to fully encounter the wide, contradictory, messy, and nuanced dimensions of human experience, it felt near impossible to begin to make sense of the men I have so loved who embody the extremes of how manhood postures and evades.

This poem reckons with how I've tried to make sense of those examples and lessons, in lineage with the mythologies, both familial and cultural, that shape my understanding of myself. 

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry, Gómez has been published in The Nation, New England Review, The Sunday Times, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Yale Review, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He can be found @CarlosAGLive or CarlosLive.com

Photo credit: Friends & Lovers Photography

Cover Art: Sikuyva Dawavendewa, “Hopi Leia” (Shō No. 8, Winter 2025/2026).

#carlosandresgomez #poetrylovers
Our winter issue is almost here, and we're delight Our winter issue is almost here, and we're delighted to kick off our issue preview with Chen Chen reading “That Time You Were Giggling, Giggling, Giggling.” The poem is also available to read at shopoetryjournal.com

About this poem: I’m drawn to laughter as a subject because it seems (is?) so impossible to write about, to put into language. But it’s the act of grasping for (and maybe never really arriving at) words that moves me and seems the central movement of a poem. I love how alive laughter, real laughter, is. And I love words that are, however inadequate for the subject and in the face of loss, defiantly alive.

Chen Chen (@chenchenwrites) lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the MFA program at New England College. He is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by Boa Editions. His latest chapbook is Love That for Us, a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein, forthcoming from & Change in 2026. His work appears in many publications, including 100 Queer Poems and The Norton Introduction to Literature. His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. 

Photo Credit: Anna Jekel.

Cover Art: Sikuyva Dawavendewa, “Hopi Leia” (Shō No. 8, Winter 2025/2026).

#gleegong #chenchen #poetrycommunity
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Publishing Stats

Since our revival issue was published in Summer 2023:

327

Poems Published

224

Total Poets Published

100

Audio Features Published

42

Poems Nominated for Prizes

2

Poems chosen for inclusion in Best Spiritual Literature

Shō Poetry Journal


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