News & Notes

Our Summer Recommended Reading List

We hope you’ll enjoy these featured selections from the past twelve months, chosen by our readers and staff.

Short Film about Sy and The Sun

Portland, Oregon–based video-production company Voxity profiled Sun founder and editor Sy Safransky, who has persisted in the world of independent publishing for nearly fifty years?

Friends of The Sun

We want to hear from you. If you chose to support The Sun with a donation this spring — or not — we’d like to learn why. 

Award-Winning Writers

Congratulations to Kristopher Jansma, Mark Gozonsky, and the other authors whose work has been recognized.

Getting The Sun to people in prison

Exchange for Change, a nonprofit organization that offers writing courses in prisons and facilitates letter exchanges between incarcerated students and writers on the outside, will release an anthology of writing and artwork by incarcerated individuals, their family members, and others.

Your support meant a lot to us this past year

Thank you for making our work possible.

For more than forty-five years, readers like you have kept this magazine in circulation. Your support makes our work possible. Here are just a few ways donations made a difference over the past year.

What Poetry Can Do

Kathryn Jordan on Writing, Inspiration, and Life after Cancer

Since the pandemic lockdown began, Kathryn Jordan has treated her time like a sabbatical: taking morning hikes in the woods, playing piano, and focusing on her writing. She met with Sun Editorial Assistant Staci Kleinmaier via video call to discuss writing and her poem “My Late Breast” in our April 2021 issue. This poem is Jordan’s first publication in The Sun.

Then & Now

Feeling connected, struggling to adapt, restoring peace through justice

Maia Szalavitz and Joseph Rodríguez from 2017, Readers Write from 2012, Marshall Rosenberg from 2003, and Duncan Moran from 1992

An Update on Our Paywall

Beginning in April, subscribers will once again need to sign in to read The Sun online. Educators and organizations that have been using The Sun’s online selections during the pandemic and need continued access, please contact us.

The Life of Saint James

At one point I had over three hundred pen pals, many of them Sun readers who supported me with letters and stamps. They offered money, but the state would routinely take 60 percent, and I would rather starve than give them that; so I asked only for books and postage. Starting a literary career behind bars requires heroic amounts of U.S. postage.