Benjamin S. Grossberg is the author of Sweet Core Orchard, winner of the Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath. His third collection, Space Traveler, will be published by the University of Tampa Press in 2013. He teaches at the University of Hartford.
The BPJ has remained remarkably consistent in its independent and eclectic editorial policy, its high standards, its international scope, its selection process, and its format. It has never missed an issue. The editors do the preliminary screening. The editorial board meets every three months to select an issue of the strongest poems that have arrived over the transom, a process that culminates in our reading each poem still under consideration aloud in a marathon session—fortified by bread and soup and love of the craft.
We believe we owe much of the vitality of the BPJ to this selection process. We have been fortunate to be the first or early publisher of such poets as Galway Kinnell, A.R. Ammons, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, W.S. Merwin, James Dickey, Philip Larkin, Rosellen Brown, Charles Bukowski, Philip Booth, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Eleanor Wilner, Lola Haskins, and more recently Sherman Alexie, Laura Kasischke, Forrest Hamer, Mary Leader, Ben Lerner, and Garth Greenwell. BPJ poems have been included in recent Pushcart prize volumes, The Best American Poems, and Best New Poets.
(Quoted from, Beloit Poetry Journal Then and Now.)
Summer 2012
