1. ONLY POEMS was voted the #1 Lit Mag of 2025 in the “Great Editors” category for the Chill Subs Community Awards (which received 13,884 votes in total!)

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2. We launched our new website—built from scratch & painstakingly designed by us. This took us 8 months!! 

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3. We published 108 poets this year across our various categories (including 77 emerging poets). We featured debut writers alongside National Book Award Honorees. We championed poets working on their first or second collections alongside poets with over 10+ books. Diamonds in the rough shine alongside movie stars in our pages. About 24% of our poets were international. We’re always thinking of fresh ways to reach more poets all over the world!

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4. We distributed over $32,000 to poets & artists in payouts (prizes + regular publication features), design work & more!

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5. In 2025 alone, we received 19,453 submissions across all our categories. That’s over 120,000 pages of poetry.

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6. Our Poet of the Year Finalist + Poet of the Week Nome Emeka Patrick’s poem “Bearing” was selected as part of the prestigious Best Spiritual Literature 2025 anthology. It was an honor to nominate this brilliant poem. This is our second industry award! Hopefully, lots more to come.

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7. We nominated 56 poems by 36 poets for the following industry awards: Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Best Spiritual Literature, Monarch Queer Awards, & the Nina Riggs Poetry Award. See all our nominations here.

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8. Our website received 300,000+ unique visitors over the course of the year. The busiest months were July & September.

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9. We launched ONLY POEMS DAILY where we email a poem every morning to now over 20K+ readers!

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10. We hit 40K+ subscribers to our weekly and daily newsletters.

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11. We launched the Bob Hicok Fellowship for Poets, & found an amazing inaugural fellow in Anya Johnson, who receives financial support, year-long mentorship, & multiple publication opportunities. We also recognized 7 finalists.

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12. We also launched a brand new lit mag for prose, Strange Pilgrims, with the same ethos as OP (pays writers, no general reading fees, ad-free, reader-supported). Strange Pilgrims’ first submission call received over 7000 submissions and we already have over 25,000 newsletter subscribers, without any imports. We’ll publish the first prose piece on January 8. 

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Our Top 5 Most Read Poets of 2025

1. Elise Powers
2. Richard Siken
3. Maria Giesbrecht
4. Shivani Mehta
5. Natasha Oladokun

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Our Top 5 Most Read Interviews of 2025

1. I Love Language It Doesn’t Love Me Back ✦ Jeremy Radin
2. Dispelling the myth of lonely writing ✦ Kim Addonizio
3. A Hole in the Sky and We Call It the Moon ✦ Richard Siken
4. The Poem Within the Poem ✦ Ishion Hutchinson
5. The Spiritual Mystery of Poems ✦ David Duchovny

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Top 5 most popular book lists of 2025

1. Which Poetry Book Are You According to Your Star Sign? – Mary Kelly
2. 7 Books to Bring You Back to Your Body – Antonia Fuller
3. 11 Poetry Books That Marry Mysticism and the Human Body – Dani Kuntz
4. 12 Poetry Books for People Who Don’t Know How to Pray – Andreea Ceplinschi
5. 8 Poetry Books about Motherhood – Emma Mott

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We’re nowhere near where we’d love for ONLY POEMS to ultimately be, but we're proud of what we’ve managed to create. We are indebted and grateful for all your love & support.

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