Cherry Tree

Founded in 2014, with its debut issue released on February 15, 2015, Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College is an annual literary magazine featuring poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary shade by emerging and established writers from across the United States and all over the world. Cherry Tree's aesthetic champions image-rich, sonically adventurous poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction which showcase whimsy and wit alongside risk and urgency. In 2016, we introduced "Literary Shade," a section featuring work that responds to and challenges oppressive social structures. Our name recalls the apocryphal story of George Washington’s ax, and we encourage writers to craft new and inventive ways to critique, to re-imagine, and to chop away at literary traditions. We endeavor to serve as both a site of coalescence and protest and a vibrant archive of human thought and feeling. Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center that has promoted the arts for nearly fifty years. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its seven issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020), and many poems have been chosen for reprinting by Poetry Daily Verse Daily, and the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and has appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).