We are open and reading for Shō No. 4. • Deadline is September 30th • We accept as we go • We are a two-person editorial team and the only readers your poems will encounter • We respond to all submissions in 30 days or less.
About the Journal
Shō Poetry Journal was started in 2002 by Sita Martin when she was battling cancer. She wanted to create a platform to promote the work of poets she knew and admired. Sponsored by Hohm Press, she solicited work from nine poets, collected a total of sixty-eight poems, and arranged them in her preferred order. Before going to press she passed on from this world.
Johnny Cordova, one of the contributing poets, was asked to step in to oversee typesetting and cover design. After contributor copies of Shō’s premiere issue were mailed out, Johnny stayed on as managing editor and opened Shō to national submissions, soliciting work in the process from a handful of poets he’d been reading.
Shō Number Two appeared in Spring 2003 and featured poetry by Lyn Lifshin, Amy Uyematsu, Jim Simmerman, Virgil Suárez, William Packard, Todd Moore, Gerald Locklin, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Ann Menebroker, A.D. Winans, Robert L. Penick, and others. We think it could hold its own in any collector’s library.
But in the summer of 2021, after ten years living in Southeast Asia, Johnny returned to Arizona and shortly thereafter received the green light from Hohm Press (our parent publisher) to resurrect Shō. So here we are.