The Editors

I wanted to get together with my fellow poets on the Porter House Review staff and suggest poetry books for all the music lovers out there so that they too might come to love poetry in the same way that I did.

How do the horrors of the past impart meaning onto our present selves? How do we sift through rotten carcasses in order to find what is growing underneath? How do we explore that which chills us in the way that we read, in the way that we write, in the way that we live?

In these times, I turn to the writers whose words hold the force of an army—the revolutionaries who have the power to change minds and elicit action with their written work.

These books need not stand for anything in particular, but they always touch down somewhere deep: taking gentle care to remind me that humanity is complex and entertainment is not simply a distraction, but the measure of what we have come to value.

Rituals & Words to Honor the Dead

Reads that keep you swimming!

In Porter House Review’s mission statement, we write that “we seek unique perspectives from both established, award-winning authors, as well as emerging and underrepresented voices from around the world.” While representing voices from historically marginalized communities has been a broad goal for the journal, the editors at PHR decided to take the next steps: public accountability for the race and gender makeup of our contributors, and concrete, measurable goals to improve the diversity of voices in the journal.

Caught up in the everyday dread and surreality of life in quarantine, it can be hard to remember the beauty of our past lives or the small joys the world has to offer in the strangest, most idiosyncratic ways.

On four notable occasions, I have finished writing for the day only to find the climaxes of my stories rearing their Hydra heads in my life. This has involved tornadoes, apartment-ruining fires, and other calamitous events. So, needless to say, there are some stories that I have vowed never to write.

The editorial staff here at Porter House Review couldn’t be more excited to celebrate our nominees for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. While PHR celebrates publishing every piece of poetry, prose, and art that our  wonderful contributors submitted over the past year, please join us in congratulating these exceptional artists and writers.

Porter House Review editors recommend their favorite Latinx artists, including Fernando A. Flores, Richard Rodriguez, and Valeria Luiselli.

It’s spooky season, and we made a list of our favorite haunted tales to round out the month of October.

Do you need to write with playlists thematically curated to your current work in progress, or do you consider even being aware of the existence of song lyrics while writing to be sacrilegious?

These are the pieces that guide our editorial sightlines—the writing that drives us to cultivate a unified publication seasoned with all the disparate flavors of writing we have sought out as readers ourselves. We hope you enjoy reading some of the language that has most recently nourished us.

In our new Porter House Reads series, we hope to exploit even that bit of leisure in order to have more conversations with you, the reader, about which words have most recently animated the fleeting jolt of collective aliveness that only the best writing can gift us.