Ciara Shuttleworth, a 2000 alumna of Gustavus Adolphus College and a third-year graduate student at the University of Idaho, has learned that her poem, “Sestina,” has been accepted for publication in The New Yorker, arguably the most prestigious literary and cultural publication in the world.
Sestinas are highly structured poems consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet, for a total of 39 lines. The same set of six words, in a recurring pattern, end all of the first six stanzas, then all six are used in the tercet.
Founded in 1925, The New Yorker has published some of the most significant writers in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Anne Beattie, John Cheever, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladmir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, Sharon Olds, W.S. Merwin and Jane Kenyon. The magazine boasts a circulation of 1,062,310. Its editors receive more than 600 poems each week for consideration.
Shuttleworth holds art degrees from both Gustavus and the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the daughter of poet and playwright Red Shuttleworth.
Shuttleworth’s poem is slated for publication this fall.
Leave a Reply