Hurrah! You made it to our 2024 Back-to-School Issue of Public School Poetry, a literary and craft journal that invokes public school tropes to invite everyone in! In our third issue ten phenomenal poets share work about otters and AI, basketball players and pelicans, Lake Erie, jaw joints, hit-and-runs, mothers and sons, tarantulas, flatbed trucks, and girls with hair on fire. As always, each of these poets also fearlessly wrote a “five paragraph essay” on another contributor’s poems that we, the Public School Poetry Vice Principals, randomly and anonymously assigned them. 

We invite you to journey through these poems just as our contributors did as they encountered poets and work they’d never seen before. They didn't know where the journey would take them and yet they went anyway and created wise, illuminating, and (at times) hilarious craft essays. We hope their work inspires you, as it has us, to go on journeys past what we already know and to keep the conversations going.