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Whatever you did, did it
—Robert Creeley

Why does TCR publish online?

Editing poetry magazines has always been a labor of love: budgets are tight, distribution scant. The Internet offers publishers a viable alternative: the ability for an interactive multimedia presentation to a global audience, absolutely free. Publishing online, furthermore, honors the tradition that poetry is an oral art and allows for a more intimate connection between poet and audience than print alone. The electronic format, further, allows for access to TCR's extensive archive, ongoing in both text and audio, available absolutely free to anyone in the world.

Why does TCR supplement the text with audio, and how did this come about?

In Issue 3, we introduced our Read Along with the Author Series, and our journal evolved into something more than we had initially conceived. With the technology of RealAudio, we were able to include voice-recordings of the poets reading their own poems exclusively for The Cortland Review.

Poetry is an oral art, and contributions are enhanced by audio. Readers can sit back and listen to the poets read aloud while they follow along in text. This dynamic creates an intimate connection between poet and audience.

How can I hear the audio, and where do I find it?

Audio clips are available in each issue through Issue 33 in the RealAudio format. Beginning with Issue 34 and the Spring 2007 Feature, audio will be available via a Flash player.

Download RealAudio
Download Flash

What kind of work does The Cortland Review publish?

The Cortland Review publishes poetry and short fiction, both solicited and by open submission. Essays, interviews, and book reviews are solicited and/or queried and approved before submission.

Why are some issues guest-edited and not others?

In order to introduce more poets to publishing online and to bring a wider variety of work to our readers, TCR has undertaken to invite well-known and highly-published poets, many of whom teach in well-known M.F.A. programs, serve on creative-writing faculties, and conduct writing workshops all over the country and the world, to guest-edit issues. Guest editors will solicit work from their friends, students, colleagues, and peers with the benefit that their issue (work chosen entirely by them) will have a distinct flavor, a personality that an issue of work selected by TCR might not otherwise have. Guest-edited issues will represent the highest quality work available to literary publications, online and in print.

TCR will intersperse guest-edited issues with its own in order to continue to honor those who submit work. Features will not be guest-edited.

Who has appeared in The Cortland Review?

The poets and writers who have appeared in our issues tend to be a fair mix of both established and up-and-coming writers from the print and online world. 

The Cortland Review also has the distinction of being the first Online magazine to bring several prominent poets from the print world to the Internet for the very first time, including: Stephen Dobyns, Richard Foerster, Tony Hoagland, Mark Jarman, Thomas Lux, A.F. Moritz, Charles Simic, R.T. Smith, and several others. A full listing is available at our Author Index.

Where is The Cortland Review read?

TCR's biggest readership is in the United States. Outside the U.S., TCR is read in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, but there are also many readers in: South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Philippines, Norway, Denmark, France, Italy, Greece, Mexico, Finland, Sweden, Thailand, Romania, Slovakia, Argentina, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, India and on and on. There are even a few readers in Zimbabwe, and submissions come from most of those places, too.

The Cortland Review has grown immeasurably since its inception in 1997, and it is still growing. It is our pledge to continue to publish what we believe to be the best original poetry we can bring you, to offer you consistently pleasant reading while, at the same time, offering what is both instructive and informative.