National Poetry Magazine Moves to EvCC

Press Release

Release Date: April 5, 2010
Contacts: Kevin Craft, EvCC English Department Chair, 425-388-9395; kcraft@everettcc.edu
Alexis Vergalla, Poetry Northwest, 908-399-9414; alexis@poetrynw.org

Poetry Northwest Magazine Moves to EvCC
Readings to Celebrate Spring-Summer Issue April 26

EVERETT, WA – National poetry magazine Poetry Northwest is moving to Everett Community College where it will be produced as part of the college's Written Arts program with new editor Kevin Craft, chair of the EvCC English Department.

For the past five years, Poetry Northwest has been produced in Portland, Ore. The magazine marks its 51st year with a move to EvCC.

The move will give students in the Written and Graphic Arts programs the opportunity to intern on a professional magazine with national distribution. As such, Everett Community College becomes one of only a few such institutions in the nation to integrate a well-established periodical into its curriculum, according to Poetry Northwest.

"Our return to the Puget Sound region is a happy occasion, both for us and the community of readers and writers this magazine has engendered and engaged for five decades," Craft said. "The magazine is a national institution. There's an abiding love for it in our region especially, which we've already felt in the many 'welcome home' letters we've received."

Although the magazine has moved, the mission remains what it has been for five decades, Craft explained.

"In the words of founding editor Carolyn Kizer, 'We shall continue to encourage the young and the inexperienced, the neglected mature, and the rough major talents and the fragile minor ones.' We remain as committed as we were in 1959 to publishing the best poetry we can find, and to expanding the role and scope of poetry in ways both public and private, innovative and traditional, as an art and as a clear and necessary dialogue in a world overrun with noise," he said.

In addition to its print issue, Poetry Northwest's web site, www.poetrynw.org , presents regularly updated features and new work by contemporary poets such as Eric McHenry and Bruce Beasley. The website also showcases poems from the magazine's vast archive.

Poetry Northwest is distributed by Ingram and Small Changes and is available by subscription or individual purchase at newsstands and bookstores around the country.