Welcome to Public School Poetry. We’re glad you’re here.

 

 

Public School Poetry was created by a group of poets who were educated through public school systems. Despite the name and our 1970s brutalist design approach, we are not a school or student-specific publication. We invoke public school tropes for this journal because we value open, accessible communities and the strangeness public school evokes. We hope our journal embodies colliding desires to learn, to break rules, skip class, get good grades, see what others are doing, and create new and better spaces.

This journal is a leap of faith and an ongoing experiment. Each contributor to Public School Poetry
agrees to write “a five-paragraph essay,” on another contributor’s poems that we randomly and
anonymously assign them. This exchange is a vital part of our mission to democratize craft talk and poetry engagement. Poems and essays appear together in each issue.

We believe politics cannot be separated from experience. We deeply believe in pluralism and tearing
down hierarchies. We believe in pizza Fridays, and recess, and sharing space. We believe poems create
conversations, that conversations create poems, and that famous and non-famous folk should have
them together.

We'll be reading for our 2025 Back-to-School issue May 1st-June 15th.

 

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