Pleiades

Pleiades is very happy to partner with , .magazine, , , and for an off site waterfront reading at AWP, 2026. We will be joined by , , and as our readers. Between 7-10 PM, you will find us at the Baltimore Rowing & Water Resource Center, 3301 Waterview Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230. See you in a week!

We’re thrilled that poet and nonfiction writer Heather Christle will be a Pleiades Visiting Writer this month with stops in KCMO and Warrensburg! All events are free an open to the public. Join us!

We’re so thrilled for a spring of Pleiades Visiting Writers with , , Destiny Birdsong and an our new issue!

NOTE: the Wednesday reading has been moved to the UCM Elliott Student Union, room 238. Join us, tonight and tomorrow for the second installment of the 2025 Pleiades Visiting Writers Series! We have the pleasure of hosting writer Ananda Lima. We can't wait to see you! Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers University, Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and named Best of the Year by Library Journal, Electric Literature, Debutiful, The Chicago Review of Books and more. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”
Lima will also be joining us again soon as judge for the 2026 Kinder/ Crump Award for Short Fiction.

Submissions for the Prufer Poetry Prize will be closing in three days, October 31st. Judged by Cedar Sigo, the winner receives $1,000 and publication in PLEIADES. Visit our website submissions page for full guidelines!

For this masthead Monday, it is with some sadness, but far more happiness and excitement for her, that we say our farewell to Dr. Jenny Molberg. We could not be happier to have had her at Pleiades and look forward to continuing the great work she has left us. Dr. Molberg will now assume the position of Editor at Large. With that, Jenny Molberg is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.
Formerly Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directed Pleiades Press and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context, she is now Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.

It is with great excitement that we do a reintroduction of Dr. Caroline Crew. Dr. Crew has been moved to the role of Editor in Chief of Pleiades, and we could not be more happy to have her. Caroline Crew is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she serves as Editor in Chief of Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her poetry and prose appears in POETRY, Kenyon Review and The Believer, among others. Author of the essay collection Other Girls to Burn, winner of the AWP Prize, her next book is a poetry collection, Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs, from YesYes Books. Crew holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford and Georgia State University. Originally from Kernow (Cornwall), Crew lives in Kansas City, where she co-owns a bookstore, .

For this masthead Monday, we would like to introduce one of our fiction editors! Brandi Wells is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fullerton. They have a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Southern California and an MFA in creative writing from University of Alabama. Their novel, Cleaner was published by Wildfire/Headline (UK) and and Hanover Square Press/Harpercollins (US).

Get ready! This October, the Prufer Poetry Prize will be open for submissions. We are very happy to welcome Cedar Sigo as our judge for 2025. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in PLEIADES. Visit our website submissions page for full guidelines!

For this masthead Monday, please welcome our CNF editor! Ashley Anderson is the author of the essay collection Sifting the Feminine: Essays on a Woman’s Body (University of Georgia Press, 2026.) Her creative nonfiction, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Quarter After Eight, Permafrost, Newfound, Tahoma Literary Review, Wraparound South, SLAB, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and others. She holds a PhD in English with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Missouri and MA degrees from Kent State University and the University of Cincinnati. When not writing or teaching, Ashley can often be found drinking a lot of coffee, making a lot of crafts, and listening to a lot of Taylor Swift.

Some fun facts about Ashley:
- Tacos are my all-time favorite food.
- I stayed at the worst AirBnB of my life at an AWP conference.
- I named my car Kiwi the Kia.