Kim Roberts

Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Issue

I am honored to present this issue celebrating Beltway Poetry Quarterly’s 20thanniversary. For two decades, so much of my time has gone toward producing this journal, and I’m proud of the range of poets I was able to bring together in its pages. I’ve learned so much from the experience! It’s a great note to end my editorship on as well: this will be my final issue. As I step down and turn the magazine over to Indran Amirthanayagam and Venus Thrash, it’s lovely to look back and to thank all the talented poets who have joined with me in this project.

This issue is the second anniversary issue. We celebrated our first decade of guest editors with the 10thAnniversary Issue (Volume 11.1, Winter 2010). This new issue compliments the first one, with poems and remembrances from 22 editors and guest editors who lent their time and talents to the journal for its second decade, from 2010 to 2019.

So much happens behind the scenes to keep this project operating. I’d like to thank the two web designers I’ve worked with, who provided their talents and beautiful design sense to the journal: Kathy Keler and Patrick Calder. Jon Gann has lent invaluable technical expertise and in-kind support (including housing the journal on his server). Generous financial support for the journal has been provided by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and HumanitiesDC. Regular grants from the DCCAH, in particular, have allowed Beltway Poetry to pay featured authors since our founding—and one of my greatest pleasures as an editor has been distributing honoraria to poets.

So much of my mental energy has been taken up by Beltway Poetry over the past two decades that it’s hard to imagine what I’ll do with all that time now that I’ll be retiring. I look forward to seeing how the journal changes and grows under its new editorship. And I offer my heartfelt thanks to all the writers and readers of the magazine for their support from its founding in January 2000 to the present.

Kim Roberts is the editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), selected by the East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program as the book that “best illuminates important aspects” of the culture of Washington, DC. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017). http://www.kimroberts.org