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POETRY submissions are OPEn!

congratulations to erica dawson on winning a pushcart prize!
listen to her poem here.

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

CURRENT 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.

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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.

PREVIOUS ISSUE

Shō No. 7

SUMMER 2025

This issue features 67 poems by 48 poets: Amber Adams • Emily Adams-Aucoin • Hannah Keziah Agustin • Ai Khanoum • Aldo Amparán • sterling-elizabeth arcadia • Michael Bazzett • Jared Beloff • Aaron Caycedo-Kimura • M. Cynthia Cheung • Christian J. Collier • Will Cordeiro • Crystal Cox • Sean Thomas Dougherty • Bobby Elliott • Danielle Shandiin Emerson • Clare Flanagan • Matthew Gellman • Kelly Gray • Saúl Hernández • Sara Hovda • Amorak Huey • Olivia Jacobson • Vasvi Kejriwal • Daniel Lurie • Jenna Martínez • Malia Maxwell • Rishona Michael • Tim Moder • Asheley Nova Navarro • Ohia, Ernest Chigaemezu • Kunjana Parashar • Paige Passantino • Nina C. Peláez • Sofia Rasic • Remi Recchia • Mallory Rodenberg • Brooke Sahni • Joan Jobe Smith • February Spikener • Jessica Q. Stark • Claire Taylor • J.K. Tsosie • Matthew Tuckner • Han VanderHart • Fred Voss • Nicholas Yingling • Aleks Zywicki

Cover art: “Interim” by Tanya Rastogi.

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Online Features

  • Jun 5, 2026

    A Conversation with Mckendy Fils-Aimé

  • May 30, 2026

    Pride Month Playlist | 2026

  • Apr 29, 2026

    Mental Health Awareness Month Playlist

  • Apr 29, 2026

    Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month Playlist 2026

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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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Next up on our Pride Playlist is Iain Grinbergs re Next up on our Pride Playlist is Iain Grinbergs reading “Wakulla” (Shō No. 8).

About this Poem: I have a love-hate relationship with north Florida, a place that shaped me most (even more than England, my homeland). In my later teenage years there, I found a small circle of friends, and that’s where the love part comes in. They helped me realize that being non-heteronormative is perfectly okay, despite what the dominant culture still demands. I also discovered, through the Beats, Buddhism there. A Zen monastery was even built near my home; the priest helped me with my social anxiety at the time and intensified my ecological interests. In short, we can’t flourish without others. The poem grew out of this.

Iain Grinbergs (he/they) is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). He earned his Ph.D. in English from Florida State University. His work appears in or is forthcoming from South Florida Poetry Journal, Meridian, Rogue Agent, and other journals.

Photo Credit: Cynthia Brown
New interview on our website and in your inbox: A New interview on our website and in your inbox: A Conversation with Mckendy Fils-Aimé, author of “sipèstisyon,” out this month from @yesyesbooks.

JeFF Stumpo speaks with Shō No. 5 contributor Mckendy Fils-Aimé about superstitions, language, generational trauma, and the role of truth-telling and love in writing about culture and inheritance. Read the interview at: tinyurl.com/mckendy-sho

Mckendy Fils-Aimé (@mr.mack88) is a New England based Haitian-American poet, organizer, and teaching artist. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and Periplus. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Adroit, Muzzle, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon, was published by YesYes Books in 2026.

JeFF Stumpo is the author of these are the waterfalls in my head, which won the 2026 Granite State Poetry Prize and is available from Yas Press (University of New Hampshire). His work has appeared or is due in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Journal, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. He, Mckendy, and Beau Williams performed the first group American-Sign-Language-based poem at a National Poetry Slam as teammates in 2010.
“Matt locks the door & says we are watching Almodó “Matt locks the door & says we are watching Almodóvar tonight. / His shoulder is in the progressive tense: urging, rising, resting / my head on its bony peak, Penelope Cruz cosplaying the Lord’s work / on the TV, my head bobbing against his breathing like a buoy.”

Listen to “Magdeburg Unicorn Sonnet” by Will Summay from our #pridemonth playlist.

About this Poem: Constructed by Otto von Guericke in the 17th-century, the Magdeburg Unicorn is an absurd amalgamation of bones set into the shape of an entirely non-existent creature. Much like this unicorn, this sonnet is a limited form that also contains disparate themes of time, cinema, grammar, and love to highlight what possibilities unfold when placing anything in relationship to one another, as well as how the process of becoming in any form is fundamentally unpredictable. My friend Matt introduced me to the films of Pedro Almodovar (“All About My Mother”) during a very difficult period of my own life, and I was struck by Pedro’s unique and complex queer storytelling which gave permission for anyone and everything to enter the picture, so to speak, and see what kind of story is possible. This poem intends to draw attention to both the excitations of possibility, as well as the wildness of simply existing as a being that can even embody and express possibility at all.

Will Summay (he/him) is a poet and psychotherapist based in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the recipient of the 2025 Page Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review and a co-facilitator of Golden Hours Workshop, a monthly writing group in Louisville. He has been previously published in Shō Poetry Journal, South Carolina Review,Michigan Quarterly Review, Foglifter Press, Palette Poetry, & Change, among others.
“I lie in so many of my poems in aims of finding a “I lie in so many of my poems in aims of finding a truth—” william o’neal ii says of their poem “Amalfi, Italy”—“not everyone understands this. I wrote this poem far away from Italy in my brownstone apartment in Bedstuy. I woke up one morning to the light casting a shadow of my arm on the white-cream wall. Then, the first line came, 'I roll over & my shadow grows / large against the nineteenth century / wall.' I started to think about hieroglyphics & history. I’ve never had a lover in Amalfi, Italy. The lover in this poem is imagined. The only time I traveled to Amalfi was a few years ago with old friends—we drank limoncello, smelled the sea & spent way too much money that summer.”

william o’neal ii is a writer from the American South, living & working in both New York & Iowa City. Their work has been published in ONLY POEMS, Rampage Party Press, The Journal, The WB Yeats Society of
NY, & HouseHouse Magazine, among others. They also work as a playwright, having premiered plays in both New York City & Los Angeles. william is currently a poetry research fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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Publishing Stats

Since our revival issue was published in Summer 2023:

375

Poems Published

269

Total Poets Published

158

Audio Features Published

61

Prize Nominations

6

Poems chosen for inclusion in anthologies

Shō Poetry Journal


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