New Letters

New Letters No other university writing program has this three-part, national publishing and broadcasting power. New Letters has won a National Magazine Award.

New Letters, a magazine of writing and art, and its companions, New Letters on the Air and BkMk Press, continue to publish the best new short stories, essays, memoirs, poetry and article, and to broadcast interviews with writers. BkMk Press has won a PEN/Faulkner. New Letters on the Air has won the Clarion. Those are just a few honors. For over 80 years, New Letters have published writers such as

Edgar Lee Masters, J.D. Salinger, e.e. cummings, May Swenson, Robert Bly, Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass, Charles Simic, John Updike, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Walker Percy, Janet Burroway, Sherman Alexie, Marilyn Hacker, Maxine Kumin alongside many writers waiting to be discovered. In 2008, New Letters won the National Magazine Award for editorial excellence in the essay category, surpassing such competitors as The New Yorker, Elle and The Georgia Review. Three works published in New Letters magazine have been chosen to appear in “The Pushcart Prize # # , Best of the Small Presses (2010).”

A boy sits in a window. A photograph freezes a moment. But in Kerry James Evans's haunting poem, that image becomes some...
06/17/2026

A boy sits in a window. A photograph freezes a moment. But in Kerry James Evans's haunting poem, that image becomes something much larger: a meditation on longing, memory, and the limits of language itself.

How do we speak what we feel when the right words don't exist? What remains of us in the moments a photograph preserves?

Tender, evocative, and unforgettable, "The Photograph | Boy in Window" invites readers to linger inside a single image and discover an entire life unfolding within it.

Read the full poem on the New Letters website. www.newletters.org/two-poems-by-kerry-james-evans/

Teaching middle schoolers is hard enough. Teaching them while they're slowly transforming into animals? That's another s...
06/15/2026

Teaching middle schoolers is hard enough. Teaching them while they're slowly transforming into animals? That's another story.

Sarah Navin's Ish is sharp, funny, surreal, and surprisingly moving—a tale of a young teacher trying to find purpose in a world that feels increasingly absurd. Beneath its humor lies a story about burnout, belonging, resilience, and the strange hope that keeps us showing up anyway.

If you've ever felt out of place, overwhelmed, or unsure where you're headed next, this story will stay with you.

Read Ish in its entirety on the New Letters website. www.newletters.org/ish-by-sarah-navin/

A piece of advice. A shared zodiac sign. A relationship defined by both closeness and distance.In "Libras," Lisa DellaPo...
06/12/2026

A piece of advice. A shared zodiac sign. A relationship defined by both closeness and distance.

In "Libras," Lisa DellaPorta traces the complicated legacy of a woman who shaped her life—and the ways we carry people with us long after they're gone.

Read the full essay on the New Letters website. https://bit.ly/43g1NXW

In this blistering, brilliant poem, Staci Halt blends heartbreak, political outrage, apocalypse, and absurdity into some...
06/10/2026

In this blistering, brilliant poem, Staci Halt blends heartbreak, political outrage, apocalypse, and absurdity into something wholly her own. What begins as a meditation on loss transforms into a surreal reckoning with power, privilege, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

Read Staci Halt's poem now on the New Letters website. https://bit.ly/4asLHxQ

In Andrew Bertaina's imaginative and heartbreaking story The City of Probabilities, entire buildings disappear, neighbor...
06/08/2026

In Andrew Bertaina's imaginative and heartbreaking story The City of Probabilities, entire buildings disappear, neighborhoods shift overnight, and certainty becomes impossible. Yet beneath the surreal premise lies a deeply human question: How do we hold onto love, purpose, and hope in a world that won't stop changing?

Read the full story on the New Letters website and step into a city where nothing stays in place—except the need to decide what matters most. https://bit.ly/3RJUi9b

Michael Carson’s “Wertach” moves through Germany, memory, war, literature, and loss with haunting precision. Following t...
05/29/2026

Michael Carson’s “Wertach” moves through Germany, memory, war, literature, and loss with haunting precision. Following the footsteps of W.G. Sebald through a Bavarian town, the essay becomes something larger: a meditation on history, displacement, photography, grief, and the strange ways the past keeps resurfacing.

Rich, reflective, and beautifully unsettling, this is an essay that stays with you long after the final line.

Read “Wertach” now on the New Letters website. bit.ly/4dyVogk

Steve Gehrke’s “Host” is fierce, heartbreaking, and impossible to look away from. Through memories of childhood illness,...
05/27/2026

Steve Gehrke’s “Host” is fierce, heartbreaking, and impossible to look away from. Through memories of childhood illness, transplant surgery, shame, anger, and survival, the poem examines what it means to live inside a body that feels both fragile and foreign.

Raw, lyrical, and deeply human, “Host” is a poem that demands to be read all the way through.

Read it now on the New Letters website. bit.ly/4dGqv8w

What does a telephone hold? Memory. Grief. Love. Distance. The sound of a life changing forever.In her stunning essay “T...
05/22/2026

What does a telephone hold? Memory. Grief. Love. Distance. The sound of a life changing forever.

In her stunning essay “Telephones,” Faith Shearin traces the evolution of phones alongside the evolution of a life—boarding school calls, rotary dials, late-night confessions, unanswered ringing, and the strange loneliness of modern technology.

Read this unforgettable essay now on the New Letters website. bit.ly/4tG7A3y

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