Anti-Racism Annual Report

In 2020, Poetry Northwest began providing an annual Anti-Racism Report with information on our efforts to support Black writers, Indigenous writers, and writers of color within our pages and within our greater literary community. In the interest of public accountability, we included our goals as an anti-racist organization engaged directly in rejecting and dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy within our magazine, as well as any instances in which we failed to meet those goals or to anticipate the needs of our diverse community. While internal accountability must take place in our work every day, we have decided to take a break from producing our public annual report in order to focus our energies more completely on the labors that directly deconstruct our own institutionalized racism. For our community’s benefit, we will continue to offer access to our previous reports here, as well as updates on the fruits and challenges of that labor as we launch new initiatives and programs to support the diverse readers and writers we are honored to serve. We also pledge here to maintain our commitment to devoting at least 50% of each print issue to the work of writers and artists from historically resilient communities. Finally, we pledge to continue our ongoing work of increasing the number of BIPOC editors on our staff, with the express goal of placing those editors in positions of leadership and power within our organization.

Current or Recent Anti-Racist Initiatives at Poetry Northwest

You can find our previous Anti-Racism Reports here: 2021, 2020.