CHICAGO — The new editor of Poetry magazine, one of the city’s most important and influential publications, is Adrian Matejka, a great poet and a good guy.
My colleague Darcel Rockett conducted a fine interview with Matejka shortly after he took the job earlier this year. He is the magazine’s first Black editor, hired in the footsteps of Michelle Boone, who in 2021 became the first woman and person of color to be president of the nonprofit Poetry Foundation, which publishes the magazine. He told Rockett, “Michelle is here; our staff is incredibly diverse and we’re all holding hands in common cause to make (the magazine) look more like what our community looks like.”
The magazine is currently in its 110th year, founded long ago in a rough and tumble city by a woman named Harriett Monroe, then an art critic for the Tribune, who famously described the open door policy of her magazine as one with a “desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.”
