About
Underworld Orchard: A Poetic Descent
Underworld Orchard is a poetry journal that celebrates diverse emerging and established voices. We publish work rooted in myth, identity, and transcendent storytelling.
Our title is a nod to the Greek goddess Persephone: her myth of being abducted by the god of the Underworld, Hades, and returning to Earth every spring is one of survival, sovereignty, and resurrection.
Each issue features “six seeds,” or six poets, to represent the six pomegranate seeds that Hades tricked Persephone into eating, which bound her to the underworld for six months yearly.
Underworld Orchard seeks poems of resilience that explore meaning amongst ruin–beauty and creation in realms of despair, death, and destruction. We favor lyric, narrative, and confessional style poems with a sharp eye towards form and poetic techniques.
We publish twice a year, during the Spring and Autumn Equinox, representing Persephone’s yearly descent and return.
About the Editor-in-Chief
Anne Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (Bowker, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017), and Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (Bowker, 2024). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient, and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her MFA in poetry from Emerson College. For more information, visit her website.