Tough Poets Review 01

Tough Poets Review launches as a bold, print-only literary journal from Tough Poets Press, the acclaimed independent publisher devoted to rescuing lost voices and publishing fearless new work.

The debut issue features an arresting lineup of writers and artists including novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, celebrated poets Marvin Cohen and Elinor Nauen, debut novelists John Tottenham (Service, 2025), Alejandro Heredia (Loca, 2025) and Nini Berndt (There Are Reasons for This, 2025), performance artist Marcher Arrant, and Reclaim NYC artist-activists HOMESICK and Damian Bielak, along with new work from Vanessa Matic, J. D. Smith, Amy Soricelli, and others.

Across 188 pages of poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and visual art, the editors curate a publication that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary. Raw, inventive, and defiantly human, Tough Poets Review invites readers to slow down, to argue, and to rediscover the physical pleasures of print.

Uncompromising in voice and vision, this first issue establishes Tough Poets Review as an essential forum for the literary outsider and the creative risk-taker-proof that independent publishing is alive, well, and gloriously unruly.