Tar River Poetry is a literary journal published by East Carolina University (ECU). Published twice a year (fall and spring), the 64-page journal consists of submitted written works of poetry, critical essays, and book reviews. [1] The journal is named for the Tar River, which runs through Greenville, NC (home of ECU). First published in 1960.
The journal grew out of an earlier publication, Tar River Poets, originally edited by ECU English professor and Director of the ECU Poetry Forum Vernon Ward. Tar River Poets published members of the Poetry Forum only (that is, poets local to Greenville, NC). Upon Prof. Ward's retirement, poet Peter Makuck took over the editorship and renamed the journal, opening it to outside submissions and publishing the first issue as Tar River Poetry in November 1978, but retaining the numbering system of the earlier journal (thus the first issue with the new name was published as issue 18, number 1). The 30th Anniversary issue, published in December 2008, included an interview with Makuck.
Tar River Poetry has published many of the best-known American poets of the late 20th and early 21st century, including Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners Claudia Emerson, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, Carolyn Kizer, Henry Taylor, and A.R. Ammons, and many other well-known poets including Sharon Olds, Leslie Norris, William Matthews, Albert Goldbarth, and Patricia Goedicke.
Greenville is the county seat of and the most populous city in Pitt County, North Carolina, United States. It is the principal city of the Greenville metropolitan area, and the 12th-most populous city in North Carolina. Greenville is the health, entertainment, and educational hub of North Carolina's Tidewater and Coastal Plain. As of the 2020 census, there were 87,521 people in the city. The Greenville, NC Metropolitan Statistical Area has also seen a population boom since the 1990s, as major companies have moved their regional, national, and international headquarters to Greenville. Companies include Grady-White Boats, Hyster-Yale Group, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Denso, among others. Minges Bottling Group, a large Pepsi facility is also located just outside Greenville.
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Roy Fisher was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, while remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, and Sean O’Brien.
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, terms intended to contrast them with larger, commercial magazines.
Archibald Randolph Ammons was an American poet and professor of English at Cornell University. Ammons published nearly thirty collections of poems in his lifetime. Revered for his impact on American romantic poetry, Ammons received several major awards for his work, including two National Book Awards for Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems and another 1993 for Garbage.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
George Moses Horton, was an African-American poet from North Carolina who was enslaved until Union troops, carrying the Emancipation Proclamation, reached North Carolina (1865). Horton is the first African-American author to be published in the United States. He is author of the first book of literature published in North Carolina and was known as the "Slave Poet".
Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.
River Styx is a literary journal produced in St. Louis, Missouri, and published two times a year by the Big River Association. It is the oldest literary journal in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Shit Creek Review is an online literary and art magazine. Its content is mostly related to poetry, and includes work belonging the differing styles of formalism and free verse by established authors and new writers. It draws on the authors and resources of a number of online poetry forums, such as Eratosphere and The Gazebo.
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite was an African-American writer, poet, literary critic, anthologist, and publisher in the United States. His work as a critic and anthologist was widely praised and important in the development of East Coast poetry styles in the early 20th century. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1918.
Peter Makuck is an American poet, short story writer, and critic. He is distinguished professor emeritus of English at East Carolina University, where he was also the first distinguished professor of arts and sciences; he has also served as visiting writer in residence at Brigham Young University, visiting distinguished professor at North Carolina State University, and visiting distinguished writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. In 1993 Makuck received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. Poems, stories, and reviews by Makuck have been published in many leading journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and others, and his work has been featured on the Poetry Daily website and on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Makuck was the founding editor of the journal Tar River Poetry. He lives with his wife, Phyllis, on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's barrier islands.
Jeff Friedman is an American poet and educator. He is known for his lyrical narrative verse rooted in autobiographical experience and for his later fabulist prose poetry and flash fiction which interweave the fantastical and the ordinary. In a review of Friedman's collection Floating Tales (2017), poet and critic Walter Bargen wrote that the author "assembles fantastic tales only to disassemble them, then reassemble them into even more impossible worlds, and yet the reader will find her-or himself believing in their possibilities and often laughing along the way." Friedman is the author of nine collections of poetry and prose, which include Black Threads (2007), Working in Flour (2011), Pretenders (2014), The Marksman (2020), and the microfiction collection, The House of Grana Padano (2022), co-written with Meg Pokrass. He lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with his wife, painter Colleen Randall.
Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by the Governor, Tim Kaine, on June 26, 2006. She succeeded Rita Dove and served in this position from June 2006 – July 2008. While serving as Poet Laureate, Carolyn started the "Poetry Book Giveaway Project" and added the "Poets Spotlight" to her webpage highlighting one poet from the Commonwealth each month, in addition to traveling widely to promote poetry in every corner of Virginia.
Julie Madison Suk is an American prize-winning poet and writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of six volumes of poetry - The Medicine Woman, Heartwood, The Angel of Obsession, The Dark Takes Aim, Lie Down With Me, and Astonished To Wake, and co-editor of Bear Crossings: an Anthology of North American Poets. She is included in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Georgia Review, Great River Review, The Laurel Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly.
Bennie Lee Sinclair was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was named by Governor Richard Wilson Riley as the fifth South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1986 to 2000.
William James Hadden Jr. was a Protestant minister of the Christian Church and a priest of the Episcopal Church He was also at different times both a military chaplain, and a university Chaplain. He also served as a politician and community leader in Pitt County, North Carolina, and worked for the desegregation of Greenville, North Carolina.
Katherine Indermaur is a writer, poet, and magazine editor. In 2008, she was appointed as the first North Carolina Student Poet Laureate by Kathryn Stripling Byer. She authored the 2018 chapbook PULSE, the 2021 chapbook Facing the Mirror: An Essay, and the 2022 poetry book I/I. She is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, the 2019 Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Indermaur was a runner-up in 92nd Street Y's Discovery Poetry Contest in 2020. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Colorado Book Award for poetry. Indermaur is an editor at Sugar House Review and previously served as managing editor at Colorado Review and as an assistant editor at Alpinist.
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