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We'd been hearing for a month or so about a forthcoming article in the Chicago Review called “Numbers Trouble,” an essay written by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on gender and contemporary poetry, plus a response by Jennifer Ashton. When I ran into Joshua Kotin, the editor of the Chicago Review at a poetry event, I told him about the buzz and asked if he'd like us to blog it. "Sure," he said, "that would be great." He went one step further and sent me electronic versions of the essays. I passed these along to Ange Mlinko and Alicia Stallings to see if they wanted to respond, and only this week, in the spirit of inclusiveness, I also sent them to our other bloggers.

In this post, we've published (with Joshua Kotin's permission) a chart and table that accompanies the Chicago Review articles, which shows the percentage of women vs. men being published in literary journals over time. We published our invidivual responses (Ange's, Alicia's, mine) to the articles as separate posts. You can read the original articles in this month's Chicago Review, which is now available for purchase.