Just got news that two of my poems have been accepted for publication in what I think is one of the finest new literary magazines in the world–Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. I am thrilled about my first international publication. Cha is one of the only literary journals in Hong Kong.

It has been my constant goal to engage more and more poetry from the international community.  Most of my models–my heroes–are not American poets. I fell in love with poetry when I encountered García Lorca. The reading list I’ve built for my MFA program includes many poets that reflect my love for work from different parts of the world, including Adélia Prado (Brazil), Jaime Saenz (Bolivia), Shuntarō Tanikawa (Japan), Georg Trakl (Austria), César Vallejo (Peru), R.S. Thomas (Wales), the invaluable Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, edited and translated by Michelle Yeh, and many others.

Last year, I discovered a Japanese poet named Kimura Nobuko, whom I wrote briefly about here. I spent a great deal of time with her collection The Village Beyond, and was deeply moved by it. It inspired a series of surreal poems that I dedicated to her, using a line of hers from an interview as the epigraph: “A dream is not just a set of images but an actual experience.”

I wanted to publish those poems in a market that would reach further than most small American literary journals. Cha specifically publishes work from, about, or related to Asia. Since the poems were inspired by, and dedicated to, a Japanese poet, I thought it would be a good match. (In a previous issue, they published four of Billy Collins’ poems about his time in Japan, so there was precedent.) Thankfully, the editors liked my poems and chose two of them for Issue 10. I could not be more excited.

This has been a great year in publishing for me so far. I have work forthcoming in Main Street Rag, and I recently received my contributor’s copies of the beautiful Rio Grande Review, a magazine published by the University of Texas – El Paso’s bilingual MFA program.

Do you read any international literary journals that publish at least some work in English? Let me know. I’d love to discover more poets from around the world, and, who knows, maybe have a chance to see my own poems crossing borders again, too.