Tar River Poetry

19/09/2025

Join us on Sunday at the End Paper Art Festival at the North Carolina Museum of Art to hear readings from the poet, Dean Tuck. In addition to reading his winning poem from the Tar River Poetry ekphrasis competition, he will also read from his book Twinless Twin. See the flyer for additional event details, and read a review of Dean Tuck’s Twinless Twin by Jason Mott, 2021 National Book Award Winner, below.

“A dreamy tale that unravels with hypnotic precision. A story of love and secrets, all played out against a backdrop of meticulous, flowing writing. The best stories are the ones that leave readers with decisions to make: about themselves, about life, about the world… Twinless Twin leaves readers with all of those difficult choices and more. It’s a novel that relies heavily on the established traditions of rural storytelling--with its tropes of magic, danger, and folklore--while grappling with contemporary themes with no loss of momentum or impact. In short: a wonderful story.”

19/09/2025

We have some new social media friends, so it's time to reintroduce our Tar River Poetry team! Meet the editor, Helena Feder.

Helena Feder has published poems, essays, and interviews in venues including North American Review, The Georgia Review, Radical Philosophy, Orion, ISLE, ASAP/Journal, Terrain.org, The Writer's Chronicle, Another Chicago Magazine, After the Art, Guernica, Green Letters, Tikkun, Western American Literature, and Critical Read. Helena is Editor of Tar River Poetry and Professor of Environmental Humanities at ECU; she’s the author of Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (Routledge) and editor of two books: You Are the River (NCMA) and Close Reading the Anthropocene (Routledge).

15/09/2025

Our first big reading event is less than a week away! Please join us this coming Sunday at the North Carolina Museum of Art in the auditorium of the East Building at 11:00 AM. The winners and honorable mentions of our very first competition will be reading their wonderful work. The event is free and open to the public. We look forward to seeing you there!

10/09/2025

Register today for this free event at the North Carolina Museum of Art!

https://ncartmuseum.org/events/tar-river-poetry-live-reading/?occurrence=2025-09-21

02/09/2025

The Fall 2025 reading period opens today, September 1, and will close September 30. We will be reading for the Spring 2026 issue, published online.

Visit the link to read more details about the submission process. We look forward to reading your work!

The Fall 2025 reading period opens September 1 and closes September 30. We will be reading for the Spring 2026 issue, published online. Our submission window is open two months of the year, January and September. Tar River Poetry acquires first electronic and non-exclusive archival rights. Rights re...

29/08/2025

Tar River Poetry has moved online, and Spring 2025, our final print issue, is now available online! Click the link to begin reading.

Poems byJane Hirshfield • “Velasquez / Boreal Wildfires”Izzy Maxson • “Wildfire Haibun”Dorianne Laux • “As I Fall Asleep” & “Lodi”Michael Leal García • “The Myth of Stars” & “In the Absence of God”Donna Prinzmetal • “What’s Left”Madina Tuhbatullina • “Dus...

04/07/2025

Thank you again to all who submitted poems to our first competition, generously sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of Art. We were overwhelmed with the response and the wonderful quality of the work. We are proud to announce the winners and honorable mentions:

First place, Dean Tuck, “After St. Matthew and the Angel”
Second place, Adam Tavel, “After Rain I”
Third place, Wynne Morrison, “In the Last Room of the MoMA Kollwitz Show”
Honorable mentions
Gina Ferrara, “January 2025 (One Hundred Year Snowfall)”
Jesse Curran, “Ronde I”
Jon Savage, “Winter 1946”
Congratulations!

Authors have been invited to read their work at the Tar River Poetry Ekphrasis event at the NCMA End Paper Festival on Sunday, September 21st at 11am. The event is free and open to the public: https://ncartmuseum.org/events/end-paper-2025-ncma-art-book-fair/

We hope to see you there! If you can’t make the event, please look for these poems in the Spring 2026 issue.

End Paper provides a venue for artists and booksellers to promote and sell artist books, prints, zines, broadsides, photo books, and more. This year’s fair also includes special satellite programs and…

16/06/2025

Dear Readers,

From Fall 2025, Tar River Poetry will be published online. We've loved our print journal, but after forty-seven years we've made the decision to move the journal online. There are good reasons for this, organizational and financial, and we hope this will enable us to grow our audience, and the audience for poetry generally. We will be renovating the website, so please don't panic if it is down for a week or two in June/July. When it is ready, we will relaunch by announcing the winners of our first poetry competition, sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the reading open to the public at the NCMA September 21. We received many wonderful poems; thank you to everyone who submitted.

We will no longer be on a subscription model; our two issues a year will be free to all (the "subscribe" buttons are gone), and more work will appear online leading up to each issue. Current subscribers will be able to submit to the journal, free of charge and with an expedited response, for the full length of their subscription. We will all miss the physical journal, but we hope this will ensure Tar River Poetry has readers and writers for decades to come. Thank you for being part of our community and for helping to steward the art of poetry.

Helena Feder, Editor
Matt Smith, Prose Editor
& the TRP Editorial Team

01/06/2025

We’re looking forward to seeing the winning poems!

08/04/2025

05/04/2025

177 Followers, 413 Following, 7 Posts

24/03/2025

See full contest guidelines at tarriverpoetry.com