The Top American Literary Journals for Poetry: A Data-Backed Ranking, 2021-2025
This article is for: Everyone!
I analyzed 5 years of Best American Poetry. Here is who wins
When I teach poets how to submit poems to journals and magazines, one of the things we look at is how to choose which journals to target.
After all, there are thousands to choose from! How do you know which are right for you?
That’s a complex question, but part of the answer is the pyramid of literary journals, that runs from a few “top” outlets at its peak, to thousands of smaller ones at its base.
The higher up the ranks a journal is, the harder it is to get into—but the more kudos you get if you do appear in it.
So if you’re looking for more poetic reputation, you should submit to the top places, but if you want more acceptances, you should avoid them.
Therefore, it’s helpful to know where a journal is located in that pyramid.
But how can you tell which journals are “top,” and which are not?
You could use guesswork—or you could keep reading! Because in this article, I’m going to give you:
A ranking of top American poetry journals, based on appearances in the annual Best American Poetry anthologies, from 2021 to 2025.
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How I made this ranking
Every year since 1988, The Best American Poetry has tried to represent the finest poems published in American literary journals and magazines in the previous calendar year.
The Series editor, David Lehmann, read widely among journals and magazines to compile a shortlist of poems, and every year a different Guest Editor (including poets like Tracy K. Smith and Matthew Zapruder) made a final choice of 75 poems.
Over the decades, the Best American Poetry series has become a significant part of the American poetry landscape. Of course it’s not perfect—it depends on the tastes of Lehmann and his Guest Editor, and Lehmann can’t possibly read all the poems published in America in a year! But inclusion in a Best American Poetry has long been a meaningful honor, and it does represent a decent attempt to map what’s best in American Poetry.
Therefore, I decided to use the last five years of The Best American Poetry to create a ranking of American poetry’s most prestigious publications.
The basic idea is simple: the more times that a publication has appeared in The Best American Poetry the higher its reputation is likely to be.
Like the anthology itself, it’s not a perfect method, but as we’ll see, the results it gives are pretty good.
(I also want to say that I got this idea from John Fox, who used to produce a similar list, but who stopped in 2018.)
For each edition of The Best American Poetry from 2021 to 2025, I noted down the journal in which each of the poems in the anthology first appeared. This made a total of 375 poems. Then I counted up how many times a publication appeared among those 375.
I considered giving the journals a weighted score, so that an entry in 2025 would count for 5 times as much as an entry in 2021, but I felt these results gave undue prominence to publications that appeared only in 2025 or 2024.
So in the end, the ranking is simply a count of the number of times a poem from that publication appeared in The Best American Poetry from 2021 to 2025.
What are the top 12 journals by Best American Poetry appearances?
You can get the full list as a printable download by clicking here, but here are the biggest winners:
1: The New Yorker (20 appearances)
2: Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets (19 appearances) [However, this is not a journal as such—you can’t submit to it yourself]
3: The Paris Review (14 appearances)
4: American Poetry Review (13 appearances)
5: Poetry Magazine (12 appearances)
6=: The Kenyon Review and Threepenny Review (both 11 appearances)
8=: New York Review of Books and The Yale Review (9 appearances)
10= The Brooklyn Rail, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review (7 appearances)
This top 12 made me feel that the method I was using was decently reliable. For all its flaws, the upper ranks of this list really do represent the most highly-regarded poetry journals in the US.
If you asked a poetry professor for the top 5 or 10 poetry publication in the country, they would most likely all include names that appear in my top 12: Poetry, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and so on.
Therefore, if you want to know which publications are in the highest tier, this list is an accurate guide. So if you’re aiming for the very top in your submissions, send to these places!
The next 33 journals: 3 appearances and up still means high quality
But it’s not only the top of the list that’s instructive. The publications down to and including 3 Best American Poetry appearances pretty all have a lot of strength to them, and are still among the most highly-regarded poetry journals in the US.
So, if you’re looking for good journals that aren’t quite as picky as the very uppermost ones, any of these is likely a good bet.
However, I did take note of publications that appeared several times in one anthology, but then were absent from the other four books. For example, The Café Review appears three times in the 2023 Best American Poetry, but not in 2021, 2022, 2024, or 2025. These journals are marked with a double asterisk (e.g. Café Review**), and I think their “true” place maybe should be lower.
13=: Bennington Review, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review (6 appearances)
16=:Allium, Five Points, New England Review (5 appearances)
19=: Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry Blog, Copper Nickel, Court Green, Georgia Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review **, Literary Matters, New American Writing**, New York Times Magazine (4 appearances)
30=: 32 Poems, Adroit Journal, AGNI, American Scholar, BOMB**, Café Review**, The Common, Harper's, Iterant, Lit Hub, Missouri Review, The New Republic, Orion, R&R**, Raritan, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly (3 appearances).
2 appearances and below are worth a try—and a read
To read the full results, click here for a printable download.
Even some of the journals with 2 appearances, or just 1, have very good reputations. Here are some I’d pick out from this end of the list:
2 appearances: A Public Space, Conduit, Indiana Review, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner.
1 appearance: B O D Y, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Southampton Review.
However, this section does get a lot more random. There are a number of publications here that I’ve never heard of—which doesn’t mean they’re bad! They might be excellent, even though they don’t have the kudos of things higher up the list.
So at this end, I’d suggest treating the entries as a reading list. Look up the website for B O D Y or Zyzzyza, sample some poems, and see what you think. If you like what you see, then submit.
After all, if they’ve gotten into Best American Poetry once, they could do it again—maybe even with your poem!
The Full Results: 125 Great Places to Send Your Poems
One last time, in case you missed it: To get the full results in an easier format, click here for a printable download.
And before I go, here are two last things to bear in mind:
1. Not on this list? That does NOT mean it’s bad
Some great journals do not appear on this list at all. The most stark omission, for example, is Rattle, probably the most widely-read poetry journal in the US, which surely merits at least some poems in The Best American Poetry! Another one that’s missing is Barrow Street, which I think is also one of America’s finest.
So don’t dismiss a journal just because it’s not in this this. As always, if you like what a publication does, then submit to it anyway.
2. Treat the ranking as a reading list
To sum up, I guess I’d say that this list is a useful beginning place for researching the most prestigious journals in America.
As always, and as I’ve already said, if you’re interested in submitting to an outlet, go read their stuff, and see if you like and admire it. I haven’t enjoyed reading New England Review for example, so I don’t submit there. But I love Ploughshares, so I submit there as often as they’ll have me!
So this list becomes at the very least an interesting reading list, a path to read your way into what’s happening in contemporary American poetry, if you so desire.
Next Steps: Choose 3 Journals
If you’re submitting to American journals, here’s a practical way to use my ranking to guide your efforts.
Download the full list, and pick 3 journals that you have never read before:. Choose:
—one from the top 12 (7 appearances or more)
—one placed between 13th and 30th (between 3 and 6 appearances)
—one from the bottom (either 1 or 2 appearances).Read a sample edition of this journal.
If it’s an online journal, that’s free!
If it’s print only, there will be sample poems on the journal’s website; or, even better, order a sample copy.Assess whether you like and admire the work you see.
If so, you have found a match!If you don’t like the journal, look for another in that grouping to check out, and repeat steps 2 and 3.
Once you have 3 journals that you like, send them your poems!
