The Best American Poetry Series

📅 1988 ✏️ David Lehman (series editor), rotating annual guest editors 📖 Scribner / Simon & Schuster 📚 Annual, 1988–2025 (38 volumes)

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The Best American Poetry is an annual anthology series founded by David Lehman in 1988, in which a different guest editor each year selects 75 poems published in American magazines and journals over the preceding twelve months. Running for 38 consecutive years through 2025, it became one of the most consistently bestselling poetry series in the United States and a running record of the American poetic 'zeitgeist.'

Overview

Founded by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, The Best American Poetry is published annually and follows a distinctive format: each year, a different prominent guest editor selects 75 poems that appeared in American periodicals during the previous calendar year, and writes an introduction discussing that year's selections. Lehman, as permanent series editor, contributes a foreword to every volume surveying the state of American poetry.

Format and Structure

Unlike historical or canon-forming anthologies, The Best American Poetry is explicitly a snapshot of a single year's published output, drawn from magazines, journals, and literary reviews rather than books. The rotating guest-editor model — a "who's who" of contemporary American poetry over the decades — ensures that editorial taste and emphasis shift year to year rather than reflecting one fixed sensibility.

Historical Significance

Over nearly four decades, the series built a cumulative, serialized record of contemporary American poetry's shifting concerns, forms, and reputations. Special retrospective volumes — including The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997 (guest-edited by Harold Bloom) and the 25th-anniversary edition (2013, edited by Robert Pinsky) — have periodically re-selected from the series' own history, effectively creating an anthology of an anthology.

End of the Series

The 2025 edition, guest-edited by Terence Winch, marked David Lehman's retirement and the conclusion of the series after 38 consecutive annual volumes — making it one of the longest-running poetry anthology series in American publishing history.

Legacy

The Best American Poetry demonstrated that an annually recurring anthology, rather than a single fixed collection, could sustain both critical relevance and commercial viability over decades, functioning as a living index of the American poetic present rather than a settled historical judgment.

Related Anthologies

The New American Poetry

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Best American Poetry series?

The Best American Poetry is an annual American poetry anthology founded by David Lehman in 1988. Each year a different guest editor selects 75 poems published in American periodicals over the prior twelve months.

When did The Best American Poetry series end?

The series concluded with its 2025 edition, guest-edited by Terence Winch, after 38 consecutive annual volumes and David Lehman's retirement as series editor.

Who selects the poems each year?

A different guest editor is invited annually to select the 75 poems and write an introduction; David Lehman, as permanent series editor, contributes a foreword to every volume.

Last updated: 2026-07-01