As a result of Lucia’s work, the magazine garnered a strong international reputation and is now highly competitive, publishing fewer than 2% of the poems submitted. In addition, Lucia established the annual Editors’ Prize and instituted The Spoon River Poetry Association Poets-in-the-Schools Program, working in schools throughout the state to teach poetry to and hold readings for youth. The new Spoon River transgressed boundaries between local and international, mainstream and experimental, and included translations and theoretically-informed reviews of contemporary and often small-press or indie books. Lucia served as the magazine’s indefatigable editor for twenty years and in that time, broadened both its scope and reach. The Spoon River Poetry Review became a biannual in 1990, and dropped “Quarterly” from its name in 1993.

The magazine moved to Illinois State University (ISU) in 1986, when Distinguished Professor Lucia Getsi took over the journal’s editorship.

SRPR was founded by David Pichaske in 1976, making it one of the nation’s oldest continuously published literary journals. Poets recently published or forthcoming in SRPR include Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Ewa Chrusciel, Joshua Corey, Joanne Diaz, Arielle Greenberg, Michael Joyce, Edward Hirsch, Joanne Kyger, James Longenbach, Shane McCrae, Jamaal May, Hoa Nguyen, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Danielle Pafunda, Kristin Prevallet, Kit Robinson, Andrew Schelling, Jean Valentine, and Rachel Zucker, among many others. Additional features in every issue of SRPR include “The SRPR Interview,” an in-depth conversation with our featured poet, as well as “The SRPR Review Essay,” a long analytical article by an established poet-critic on new books of contemporary poems. In this spirit, each issue of SRPR features a chapbook-length collection of poems by a featured poet with an Illinois connection, as well as a robust variety of outstanding poems from across the nation and world that experiment with and sometimes cut the moorings by which we feel tethered to the known. Today, SRPR revises its long-standing fascination with regionalism by celebrating a poetics of emplacement: writing that reveals the borders of our comfort zones as sites of connection rather than irreconcilable difference. Contrary to popular belief, SRPR is not associated with Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, but was titled after the river in central Illinois that was itself purportedly named for the freshwater mussel shells used by the region’s Native Americans and early colonists as eating utensils-as spoons.

Across spoon river