MacQ’s founding editor, Clare MacQueen, is pleased to announce the nominations of three poems and one essay for Best Spiritual Literature. Results will be announced next summer, and the anthology will be printed in Autumn 2024.

As described by Orison Books (Asheville, North Carolina):

Best Spiritual Literature is an annual collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives, that appeared in periodicals in the preceding year. Our anthology aims to not only fill, but expand the space left by the absence of the Best American Spiritual Writing series. [...] In our view, spiritual writing has little to do with subject matter. Rather, the kind of work we seek to publish has a transcendent aesthetic effect on the reader, and reading it can itself be a spiritual experience...

Judges this year include Diamond Forde (poetry), Jacinda Townsend (fiction), and Kazim Ali (nonfiction). Additional information is available in the submission guidelines for Orison Books.

I’m deeply grateful to the following fine poets and artists for publishing with MacQueen’s Quinterly:

• ⚡  Breath of the Lord [ekphrastic poem] by Robert L. Dean, Jr.
  
  
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• ⚡  O, To Be a Curmudgeon [poem] by Margaret Dornaus
  
  
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• ⚡  Through a Curatorial Eye: The Apocalypse This Time [essay,
  with visual art] by Kendall Johnson
  
  
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• ⚡  Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time [ekphrastic poem] by
  Jennifer B. Kahnweiler
  
  

Best-of-luck wishes to them all!

Links to our nominations for previous issues:

Best Spiritual Literature [2023 edition]

The Orison Anthology [2022 edition]