Tupelo Quarterly
Tupelo Quarterly, a literary journal, extends and expands upon the vision of Tupelo Press, publishing work by emerging and established writers and artists of many sensibilities and styles.
Photo credit: Wendy Ide Williams, Instincts of the Heart
Tupelo Press, and its affiliated literary quarterly, are marked by a rich history of championing writers who are underserved within the literary community, with 62% of our list comprised by women, compared to other literary, trade, and academic publishers, whose ratio hovers around 30%. We also take pride in bringing greater visibility to writers of color, LGTBQ writers, and writers from Indigenous communities. In 2019, for instance, Tupelo Press released the first anthology of North American Indigenous writing in over thirty years. Tupelo Press authors have been recognized with three Whiting Awards, the Lannan Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart Prizes, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, Norma Farber First Book Award, NEA Literature Fellowships, NEA Translation Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Open Book Award, appointments to the National Society of Arts and Letters, among many other honors. One Tupelo Press author, an immigrant, was currently short-listed for The National Book Award. What’s more, these writers have achieved great visibility and recognition through their affiliation with Tupelo Press.
Tupelo Quarterly was created to leverage off of the burgeoning reliance by readers of all sorts on access to digital media, and to deepen and extend Tupelo Press’s visionary brand and mission. Our staff is comprised of nearly forty editors, who were appointed precisely because they embody artistic excellence across a full range of race, class, gender, ethnic, aesthetic, and educational backgrounds.
OUR MISSION
Each Tupelo Quarterly issue documents the conversations that occur within this vibrant and diverse community of editors, and extends well beyond its boundaries. This dialogic impulse is visible in each issue’s structure, as our editors are invited to solicit and present, with a critical introduction, work that is important to them, whether as a reader, scholar, or practitioner. Similarly, our issues present “Editorial Features,” which include interviews, essays, and hybrid prose by our editorial team, alongside the creative work that they accept and feature, offering a glimpse of the curatorial hand shaping the magazine. We are also heartened and thrilled to provide a powerful platform that enables dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, and have devoted a section of the magazine to “Collaborative and Cross-Disciplinary Projects,” featuring video, sound poems, text and image projects, and sculptural poems. In other words, we are extending the boundaries for what the written and visual arts can accomplish in the age of digital media. This collaborative and cross-disciplinary section aims to showcase the full range of forms that this exchange between the literary arts and the fine arts can take. Thanks to digital media, that exchange itself becomes a new art form. In recent issues of Tupelo Quarterly, our collaborative and cross-disciplinary offerings have included new work by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Nick Flynn, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, David Dodd Lee, Kate Greenstreet, and more. This impulse toward hybridity, in many ways, supports and deepens Tupelo Press’s existing goal of exploring the possibilities for dialogue between poetry and the fine arts. While Tupelo Press is known for publishing artisan quality paper editions, Tupelo Quarterly investigates, argues for, and succeeds in offering a wealth of other, emerging possibilities for bridging poetry and the fine arts in a digital landscape.
HOW TO SEND WORK
All submissions must come through Submittable. We do not accept any hardcopy submissions. All our open calls are listed there with specific details relevant to each opportunity. Please read the guidelines for each category carefully. If no categories appear, that means the reading period is closed. Simultaneous submissions are welcome as long as you notify us immediately at contactTQ@tupelopress.org if the work is placed elsewhere. Submissions may not be changed after entry. We do not accept previously published material.
ETHICALGUIDELINES
Tupelo Quarterly endorses and abides by the Ethical Guidelines of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), which can be reviewed here.
NOTIFICATIONS
Submittable sends automated confirmations of receipt, and we will use Submittable to accept or decline all work. Beyond these notifications, kindly refrain from requesting an individual response to confirm receipt of your submission, contest entry fee payment, or status in a contest. Our turnaround for submissions is approximately three months for any given issue of the journal.
ACCEPTANCES
If Tupelo Quarterly publishes your work, we ask for 1st serial rights and acknowledgement if the work later appears elsewhere. We also ask to retain the option to include the work in a print anthology, The Best of Tupelo Quarterly, if the editors select it for the book. Authors/artists retain copyright.
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SPOTLIGHT:
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EDITOR'S NOTE
Each Tupelo Quarterly issue documents the conversations that occur within this vibrant and diverse community of editors, and extends well beyond its boundaries. This dialogic impulse is visible in each issue’s structure, as our editors are invited to solicit and present, with a critical introduction, work that is important to them, whether as a reader, scholar, or practitioner. Similarly, our issues present “Editorial Features,” which include interviews, essays, and hybrid prose by our editorial team, alongside the creative work that they accept and feature, offering a glimpse of the curatorial hand shaping the magazine. We are also heartened and thrilled to provide a powerful platform that enables dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, and have devoted a section of the magazine to “Collaborative and Cross-Disciplinary Projects,” featuring video, sound poems, text and image projects, and sculptural poems. In other words, we are extending the boundaries for what the written and visual arts can accomplish in the age of digital media. This collaborative and cross-disciplinary section aims to showcase the full range of forms that this exchange between the literary arts and the fine arts can take. Thanks to digital media, that exchange itself becomes a new art form. In recent issues of Tupelo Quarterly, our collaborative and cross-disciplinary offerings have included new work by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Nick Flynn, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, David Dodd Lee, Kate Greenstreet, and more. This impulse toward hybridity, in many ways, supports and deepens Tupelo Press’s existing goal of exploring the possibilities for dialogue between poetry and the fine arts. While Tupelo Press is known for publishing artisan quality paper editions, Tupelo Quarterly investigates, argues for, and succeeds in offering a wealth of other, emerging possibilities for bridging poetry and the fine arts in a digital landscape.
MEET THE EDITOR:KRISTINA MARIE DARLING
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Darling has taught at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, the University of Cyprus, The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European M.F.A. Program, and Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland Campus, where she leads a biannual writing workshop for diplomats. Dr. Darling currently teaches as Visiting Faculty in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She will serve as Visiting Researcher at Universidade do Porto and Visiting Fellow at the European Law and Governance School in Spring 2025, as well as Visiting Faculty at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid for the 2025-2026 academic year and Visiting Scholar the American Research Center in Sofia in summer 2026. Dr. Darling has served on juries for the Fulbright Specialist Award, the Corporation of Yaddo’s artist-in-residence program, the literature fellowship program at Millay Colony for the Arts, the Helene B. Wurlitzer Foundation’s artist-in-residence program, and many other awards in the United States and abroad. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast.
