“A Drop of Seawater Under the Microscope,” a poem by Amy Gerstler, profess of creative writing at the University of California at Irvine and author of four poetry collections, published in the special issue on New York School and Diaspora of Valley Voices: A Literary Review, has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2016. Her poem was selected by Edward Hirsch, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a poet and critic of nine books.
“This inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2016 anthology is exciting not just for the poet but also for our magazine; it’s a token of national recognition of Valley Voices,” said John Zheng, department chair and editor of Valley Voices. “We are grateful especially to our guest editor, Angela Ball, professor of creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi, for editing this great special issue that included so many well-crafted poems and essays. Valley Voices has been publishing writers worldwide, including a Nobel Prize winner, a National Book Awardee, and many other excellent luminaries. We are also eager to publish students’ work of high quality.”
A citation from Academy of American Poets says, “The Best American Poetry series has become one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world. For each volume, a guest editor is enlisted to cull the collective output of large and small literary journals published that year to select seventy-five of the year’s ‘best’ poems. The guest editor is also asked to write an introduction to the collection, and the anthologies would be indispensable for these essays alone…” Chicago Tribune praises The Best American Poetry as “A best anthology that really lives up to its title.