The seeds of Brittany Rogers’s debut poetry collection, Good Dress (Tin House, October 2024), were planted in 2017. At the time, Rogers was working on a manuscript about family, motherhood, and inheritance titled “What Runs in the Blood.” Three years later, however, she felt distant from the poems and decided to start from scratch. Taking just a handful of poems from her initial attempt, Rogers wrote the book that became Good Dress. “The collection shifted from my centering the roles and obligations I held to others, to my centering my relationship to autonomy and audacity,” she says. The resulting poems, which include self-portraits, short narratives, pastorals, odes, aubades, and formal plays on documents, show a clear-eyed speaker refusing external definition. “I belong to me,” writes Rogers in Good Dress. “I belong to me.”
Brittany Rogers, author of the debut poetry collection Good Dress. (Credit: Stephanie Hill-Wood)
Similar to the care she showed in putting together her debut, Rogers takes her time to thoughtfully submit her work. She first reads issues of a magazine to detect its vibe, energy, and stylistic tendencies and then sends an individualized packet of poems. She found each piece in Indiana Review, for example, to display a “specificity and strength of voice.” So she sent the journal “Doin’ Too Much,” which, like much of Rogers’s book, celebrates the spirit and style of her hometown, Detroit. The review was “a space where I felt I had permission to show up as my full self in my work,” says Rogers. The print biannual, which is edited by graduate students at Indiana University in Bloomington, features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The editors also occasionally publish folios of work around a theme; recent themes include “The Possibility Is Here” and “Between Worlds.” Submissions in all genres are open via Submittable with a $3 fee until October 31 and will reopen on February 1.
Another journal that Rogers singles out for its boldness is Mississippi Review, which published the opening piece of her collection, “Money,” in 2021. (“I don’t want to be rich / I want enough coin / to relax / to spoil // my damn self,” writes Rogers in the poem.) She submitted it to the print magazine’s annual literary contest, which awards a prize of $1,000 each for a poem, a story, and an essay. In 1972, Gordon Weaver founded the Mississippi Review, which was later edited for over thirty years by novelist Frederick Barthelme. The biannual journal is housed at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and recently relaunched its website with a crisp, modern design. Submissions to the journal are currently open via its contest; entries will be accepted with a $16 entry fee until January 1, 2025.
In Good Dress, Rogers depicts many moments of coming of age and coming into herself. Two such poems were at home in the Journeys folio of Prairie Schooner, guest edited by poet Ama Codjoe. Rogers was drawn to the curatorial vision of the print quarterly’s editor in chief, Kwame Dawes, as well as its proven track record of publishing writers at all phases of their careers. Prairie Schooner, which launched in 1926 and is published by the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Press, features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. The journal is endowed in perpetuity by Glenna Luschei, a writer and a former editorial assistant of the review; it also sponsors an annual book prize and a nonfiction contest. Submissions to the quarterly in all genres are currently open with no fee via Submittable and postal mail.
Rogers published two Detroit-based poems—one rooted in the Detroit Pistons’ home arena, another in a Baptist church—in the Hopkins Review, which seeks to pay tribute to its own hometown, Baltimore. Edited by poet Dora Malech, fiction writer Danielle Evans, and students at Johns Hopkins University, the review aims to “bring the international, national, and local together under one cover.” The print quarterly always features the work of a Baltimore artist on its cover, with original and translated poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from writers all over the world. The journal also publishes work online; Rogers highlights the interview series run by one of its editors, Giovannai Rosa, praising Rosa’s “attention to detail and critical questions.” General submissions are open annually in September and October with a $3 fee for nonsubscribers.
“The underneath is as valuable as the seen, and sometimes more so,” write poets Maya Marshall and Marty McConnell, the founders of the online magazine Underbelly. “Our goal is to bring to the surface what we often strive to make invisible: the joyful, arduous, miraculous, by turns tender and brutal process of shepherding a poem from its primal state to its final state.” Underbelly is devoted to poetic revision, with every issue featuring poets sharing a draft and the final version of a poem alongside a brief description of their editing process. “Each issue feels like a mini master class on how to transform a draft to a polished poem,” says Rogers, whose work appeared in the magazine in 2022. Poets such as Jericho Brown, Tyehimba Jess, Ada Limón, and Nicole Sealey have shared work in Underbelly, which releases issues about four times a year. The editors currently solicit all work.
Dana Isokawa is the editor in chief of the Margins and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
