Shō Poetry Journal

12/11/2025

We are excited to announce the prize honorees for our winter issue! Rebecca Morton is the runner-up of the Shō Poetry Prize for three poems titled “Uncertainty Principle.” Rebecca’s poems will be published in Shō No. 8 (Winter 2025/2026). Look out for her audio feature soon!

Rebecca Morton () is a q***r poet based in Chicago. Her debut chapbook Afterbirth (Small Harbor Press, 2024) explores her family’s involvement in the foster care system. Her poems appear in Smartish Pace, The Offing, Sugar House Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere, and have been featured on Verse Daily. A recent Tin House Summer Workshop participant, she holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University.

Congratulations, Rebecca!

12/11/2025

We are excited to announce the prize honorees for our winter issue! Rukan Saif is the runner-up of the Sita Martin Prize for her poem “Harami Ghazal.” Rukan’s poem will be published in Shō No. 8 (Winter 2025/2026). Look out for her audio feature soon!

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.

Congratulations, Rukan!

12/08/2025

Every time we head to print, we share a home printer mock-up of the cover from our previous issue. Here’s a photo of our mock-up for Shō No. 7, our summer issue. Artwork: “Interim” by Tanya Rastogi.

12/05/2025

Congrats to our Pushcart Prize nominees!

• Jo Bear: “After the Gulls” (Shō No. 6)
• Christian J. Collier: “Nocturne” (Shō No. 7)
• Erica Dawson: “Portrait of the artist as sonnet for Dickinson’s line A wounded deer—leaps highest—” (Shō No. 6)
• Chris Hoshnic: “Event / Response” (Shō No. 6)
• Maja Lukic: “Wings of Desire” (Shō No. 6)
• Meg Reynolds: “Milkstone” (Shō No. 6)

11/30/2025

Get your packets ready! Submissions for Shō No. 9 open on December 15.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗰𝘀
1. 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝘂𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗽𝘁
• Submit up to 5 unpublished poems in a single PDF or Word doc/docx
• Include your name and page numbers on every page
• Name your file ‘FirstName_LastName’ e.g. Virgil_Suarez.pdf (shoutout to , published in Shō No. 2, whose poems will appear in our pages 22 years later, in Shō No. 8!)

2. 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 (𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲)
• Include your poem titles
• Include a short third-person author bio
• Simultaneous submission? Let us know

𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 & 𝗥𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀
• We do not accept work that has been generated by or aided by AI
• Please do not submit poems that have been posted online/published in any form
• To withdraw individual poems, use the ‘Messages’ feature in Submittable (do not notify us via email or our contact form)

𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄
• We charge a $3 submission fee for a response of 30 days or less
• Submissions are always free for U.S. Indigenous poets
• We offer at least one free BIPOC pop-up window per reading period
• All contributors receive a print copy of the issue. U.S.-based authors receive a discount on extra copies
• Editors’ Prizes of $150 each are awarded to two U.S.-based poets in each issue. The winners and two runners-up each receive a one-year subscription to Shō Poetry Journal

11/29/2025

All issues of Shō Poetry Journal are on sale for $8 until Sunday November 30! We’re including a free cover art postcard with every order.

We produce a print journal because we believe poetry hits differently when held in the hands.

Cream/antique paper, matte covers, beautiful cover art by talented early-career artists, and up to 73 poems by 40-50 fantastic poets.

Sending a gift? Feel free to include a message for the recipient in the notes.

Quick guide in the comments.

Images/
1. Shō No. 7 held up to a reddish door in golden hour light
2. Spines of Shō Poetry Journal issues 3 through 7 on a small dark brown bookcase
3. Close-up of Shō bridge printer on a creamy page
4. Close-up of poem “Grouse Season” by Malia Maxwell from Shō No. 7
5. Close-up of poem “After My Father Died” by Vasvi Kejriwal from Shō No. 7
6. Shō issues 3 through 7 stacked on a small round table in front of a long wooden bookcase

11/28/2025

Quick coffee stop before we head to the post office to mail out nominations⏳

11/21/2025

We published 124 poems in our last two issues. We can only nominate six poems for the Pushcart Prize! The Shō team will be meeting tomorrow to vote—Shō No. 6 and 7 contributors, don’t feel alarmed if you keep sneezing…

Also, issues are on sale till the end of the month! Get them at our website; no promo code needed.

11/20/2025

is running their annual Best Lit Mag Awards. Voting is open to all! If what we’re doing at Shō Poetry Journal resonates with you, please consider voting for us! 🥹 You can vote for up to five lit mags.

Vote here: https://www.chillsubs.com/best-lit-mag-awards

11/13/2025

Sean Thomas Dougherty

"Writing can heal wounds by witnessing them (perhaps our own as well as others’). Think here of poetry as the packing in an open wound as it heals from the inside out. The words themselves don’t do the healing; in fact, they hold the top of the wound open. Some wounds must be held open to heal."

—Billie R. Tadros

https://poetry.arizona.edu/blog/taylor-swift-wounded-reading-metaphor

11/10/2025

We’d like to get issues of Shō Poetry Journal into more hands! From now until November 30, we're mailing out our five most recent issues at $8 each + postage (33% off). Orders $24 and above ship free.

No code needed: shopoetryjournal.com/shop

Pictured: Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25); cover art by Tanya Rastogi.

07/25/2025

Listen to Jo Bear read “After the Gulls” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25).

About this poem: In Ireland, where I lived for several years, a town called Balbriggan is the only place in the country that has been given permission to cull its seagull population. On a national level, the gulls are protected, but Balbriggan was able to successfully lobby for an exemption to address the severity of the conflicts between gulls and town residents. While doing further research, I learned that gulls intentionally return to the same nest year after year; they return to a place of familiarity to rear their family, regardless of what may have been built around them in the meantime. This policing of migration—the natural movement of the living world—struck me as drawing instructive and alarming parallels to the processes through which fear leads to the dehumanization and disappearance of bodies deemed expendable in pursuit of the false promise of safety.

Jo Bear is a poet, scholar, and educator with an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from University College Dublin. They are a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 Zoeglossia Fellow. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in ONLY POEMS, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Shō Poetry Journal, West Branch, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere.