This are a few of the people that have been published in Kestrel several times or that have caught my attention because of their success.
The information provided is their direct account of the experiences they had with Kestrel, and some information about their own lives and work.
"I found out about Kestrel around 2008 when I came to Fairmont to do a reading from one of my new books. I had known Dr. Donna Long for years; we'd worked together on literary projects in Tallahassee, FL. When I was on campus, I read Kestrel and saw that it was a fine journal. Shortly after that I sent some poems for consideration and Elizaeth Savage accepted them. I am a writer who likes to be connected to good journals, so I continued to send work to Kestrel and was fortunate to have many poems, essays, and one short story published in its pages. I don't know how many times I have appeared in Kestrel, but I am always happy to be there and happy to attend the celebrations. I had published a lot of work before I appeared in Kestrel, but I am sure being a Kestrel writer has enriched my career."
"I am thrilled to have been in Kestrel several times as it is one of my favorite journals. It has the most professional staff of any journal I've worked with, and it is always an honor to flip through the table of contents to see who else is in an issue I am in.
I met the editors through a friend of mine who knows them. At the beginning I believe I emailed the submissions, before they got Submittable, which makes it easier, to be sure, but a bit less personal. Interestingly, I prefer it to be less personal. So it works out.
I believe I've submitted about six times and been in three, maybe four. I am most proud of one part of one work. One of the first pieces Kestrel published of mine was "Cycle," a three part series about my dad. The third part of that, "Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall," remains one of my most popular short pieces, my favorite, and went on to several anthologies. "
"I have submitted poems to Kestrel twice — 1) 2016, all poems rejected; 2) 2019, one accepted. I was really happy about that acceptance as I knew how high their standards are, so it meant a lot to me.
I found out about Kestrel through word of mouth as well as from fellow writers of poetry on Facebook. There is lots of communication among writers and publishers in the Mid-Atlantic states (I live in Delaware) — it’s rather a small world, as opposed to a more faceless place like NYC.
I have several chapbooks published in the past as well as a full-length book of poems, and I am currently working on another chapbook. This new chapbook is a difficult process because the poems are about the deaths of two young people in my family a number of years ago — very hard to write about without feeling that I’m just “using” this material because it was, and still is, so devastating to my family. One of these situations was the death of my nephew on 9/11 in the Twin Towers. I want to express and describe the terrible shock and devastation to my family but without being melodramatic. It’s a fine line, and it’s taken twenty years before I have felt able to attempt this. I submitted the main poem in the manuscript to a prestigious contest in Philadelphia and it received Honorable Mention so that was very reassuring.
The poem that Kestrel did publish in 2019 is titled "Self-Portrait as Peninsula”. In it I use metaphors to explore and describe brokenness and healing. At this point I’m not certain whether I’m going to include this poem in my chapbook manuscript or not.
Currently I am involved in several organizations for writers, including Eastern Shore Writers Association. In the past I was Assistant to the poetry editor for Delmarva Review, and currently I am Co-Editor of Quartet Journal, an online journal showcasing poems by women over 50."
"I first heard of Kestrel in the early 90s (I'm thinking 93, but my memory's a little fuzzy on that) when Martin Lammon, one of the founding editors, read at Marshall. He brought copies of the journal with him. It had a generic cardstock cover, but I thought it was really cool that West Virginia had a literary journal. I've been submitting work to journals since around 1991 when I was a sophomore at Marshall, and even at that point I kept an encyclopedia of journals in my head. I added Kestrel and started sending stuff there. I never made it in under Lammon's editorship, though (to tell you the truth, I never made it into the other journal Lammon edited after he left Fairmont either, though I can't recall its name. Things are a little weird from there. I got locked up in 2007, and when I made it out in 2012, I started sending things off to Kestrel again. Elizabeth, Donna, and Suzanne had taken over by then, and they accepted one of my poems. I came up for the Kestrel celebration in 2014, right after my book The Prisoners came out, It was my first reading in about ten years, and it was a total joy. It reminded me why I love this life. Anyway, I've submitted every chance I get since then. Sometimes they take my stuff, and sometimes they don't, but it's always worth doing. One of my Kestrel poems, "Resentment," was picked up by Verse Daily, which is a big win. You asked about my favorite to have appeared in the journal, it's probably "But Won't You Tell Us How to Live?" which comes from a question in an Adam Zagajewski poem, and from which the title of my next book comes: Tell Us How to Live. "
