The Threepenny Review

Wendy Lesser founded The Threepenny Review in Berkeley in 1980 and has edited it ever since — one of the longest continuous single-editor runs in American letters. The tabloid-format quarterly publishes poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism with a plainspoken intelligence that has attracted contributors from Thom Gunn and Czesław Miłosz to Kay Ryan and Louise Glück.

It is that rare thing: a top-shelf journal that is free to submit to and pays well — $200 per poem at last posting. Reading is open January through June; response times are unusually fast (often under two months). Threepenny neither uses Submittable nor charges fees, a deliberate stance.