ISSN 2167-1672
OccuPoetry collects and publishes poetry about economic justice/injustice, greed, protest, activism, and opportunity. OccuPoetry is an independent project inspired by the Occupy Movement. It is not a project of any one city’s Occupy encampment. This is the space we choose to occupy. This is what we can give.
OccuPoetry is edited by Paco Marquez, Phillip Barron, and Katy Ryan.
Editor: Originally from Mexico and Northern California, Paco Marquez is also poetry editor at Washington Square. His work has appeared in Apogee, the Squaw Valley Review, and OccuPoetry (prior to joining the editorial team). One of his poems went up on public mural, through the Sacramento Metropolitan Art Commission’s Del Paso Words & Walls Project. He’s been featured as Lo-Writer of the Week in Juan Felipe Herrera’s California Poet Laureate website, and he recently completed an MFA in poetry at NYU.
Founding editor: Phillip Barron’s first book of poetry, What Comes from a Thing, won the 2015 Michael Rubin Book Award and will be published by Fourteen Hills Press. Elsewhere, recent poems appear in New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Fourteen Hills, and Janus Head. He is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and served as the 2012 editor of Squaw Valley Review.
Editor: Katy Ryan is an associate professor of English at West Virginia University. In 2004, she founded the Appalachian Prison Book Project, a community and student organization that sends free books to prisoners. Her edited collection, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States, is available from University of Iowa Press.
Poets are social critics by default. That is, since not very many of us take the same care to craft our daily language that poets do, poets often are (or see themselves as) outsiders. And as outsiders, many poets are well-positioned to see things that not everyone is able to see. OccuPoetry seeks to collect many viewpoints.
None of the beliefs or political messages expressed by poets published in OccuPoetry represent the editors’ beliefs, nor does this site represent the views of the editors’ employers.
There are other poetry-driven websites and projects popping up in support of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement. OccuPoetryis not affiliated with these projects but links to them in a show of solidarity.