The Foundation For Light Verse

Welcome to Light. Founded in 1992 by John Mella under the name Light Quarterly, its Americas oldest and best-known journal of light verse. My fellow volunteers and I are proud to be building on Johns mission to restore humor, clarity, and pleasure to the reading of poems by publishing some of the wittiest poets around. ~ Melissa Balmain, Editor Lig... hts many friends and supporters include: Directors of the Foundation for Light Verse, Inc., publisher of Light: Melissa Balmain, Bruce Bennett, Dan Campion, Frank Osen Melissa teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism at the University of Rochester. Though she has received the Able Muse Book Award and the Poetry by the Sea Sonnet Award, some of her favorite prizes are Abe Lincoln bobbleheads, salt and pepper shakers that look like outhouses, and other classy items she has won in light-verse contests. Her poems have appeared in such places as The American Bystander, Ted Koosers American Life in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, The Spectator (UK), The Washington Posts Style Invitational, and assorted anthologies; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeneys, and Success. Melissas poetry collections are Walking In on People (Able Muse Press, 2014) and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books, 2021). Kevins poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Criterion, Light, and numerous other journals, and he has been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Some of his poems have been pickled in anthological brine (to quote E.A. Robinson) in Measure for Measure, Irresistible Sonnets, Able Muse Anthology, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the Worlds Most Popular Website. His poetry chapbook, Los Angeles in Fog, is an unreliable guide to Southern California weather. Once an itinerant educator, Kevin taught ...Read More