MacQ’s founding editor, Clare MacQueen, is pleased to announce the nominations of five poems for Best Spiritual Literature. Results will be announced next summer, and Volume 10 of the anthology will be printed in Autumn 2025.

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....

We believe that the best spiritual art and literature call us to meditate and contemplate, rather than asking us to adopt any ideology or set of propositions. This type of art evokes the human experience of transcendence and explores the mysteries of being, and in so doing opens our minds and hearts to the divine and the possibility of becoming the fullest humans we can be. 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....

(Additional info available at Orison Books submission guidelines.)

As Clare says, “I’m deeply grateful to these wonderful writers for publishing with MacQueen’s Quinterly, and I wish each of them the best of luck!”

• ⚡  St. Francis Renounces All Worldly Goods [ekphrastic poem] by
  Simona Carini
  
  
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• ⚡  Proselyte by CS Crowe
  
  
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• ⚡  “Chaleur (Warmth)” from Marcus Elman’s debut chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (MacQ, 1 September 2024)
  
  
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• ⚡  I don’t know what happens when we die [prose poem] by
  Jessica Purdy
  
  
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• ⚡  A Kind of Prayer for My Bedridden Wife by Thomas A. Thomas
  
  

Links to our nominations for previous issues:

Best Spiritual Literature [2024 edition]

Best Spiritual Literature [2023 edition]

The Orison Anthology [2022 edition]