As many of our online readers already know, at the end of this summer NER’s poetry editor C. Dale Young will be leaving his post after nineteen years on our masthead. His last issue as poetry editor, due out in October, will feature 20 poems he selected over the years and highlight the range of work and joy of discovery he brought to the magazine. C. Dale began reading poetry for NER as a medical student in the mid-nineties, continued on as associate editor, and then became poetry editor in 2000. We have been incredibly fortunate to have had such a passionate and discerning editor selecting work for our pages for so many years, and we salute C. Dale for his versatility, reliability, and dedication. We will miss him in ways we can’t yet imagine!
But we are equally fortunate to be able to announce that our new poetry editor will be Rick Barot. Rick is not only an accomplished poet but he is also a devoted reader and teacher of poetry with wide-ranging taste and vision. He served as a reader for NER for a number of years, in between publishing his poetry and essays in our pages. (Read his most recent essay, The Image Factory.) He begins as poetry editor in September.
Rick has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, where he is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, PLU’s low-residency MFA in creative writing. Sarabande will publish his third book of poems, Chord, in 2015.
We look forward to working with Rick in his new role, and to bringing our readers an ambitious and exciting selection of poetry in the issues to come.