MiPOesias Magazine 2007 - Asian-American Issue

The Asian-American issue of MiPOesias Magazine has just come out, officially commencing what I think will be an exciting year in Asian-American poetry. Edited by Nick Carbo, it marks the first collection of Asian-American poets since the publication of Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004, ed. Victoria Chang) and, by the end of the year, we should see the publication of Contemporary Voices from the East: An Anthology of Poems (W.W. Norton, 2007, eds. Tina Chang, Ravi Shankar, and Nathalie Handal) as well.

This issue also represents the continuing efforts of MiPOesias, run by publisher Didi Menendez, to feature the work of a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse range of poets with aesthetically diverse styles of writing. In my admittedly biased opinion, MiPOesias represents the best of independent poetry publishing. Through the dedication of Didi Menendez, Amy King, Jenni Russell, and many guest editors, poets, and readers, it has remained open to an incredibly broad range of contemporary poets and become increasingly successful over the past seven years. I'm highlighting this point, because it is never easy to run a great poetry publication, and I think that the people "behind the scenes," so to speak, seldom get sufficient recognition and credit, which they deserve, because they play such an important role in shaping the present and future of poetry.