Our Best of the Net Nominations

 

Each year, Poets Online nominates poems for the Pushcart Prize Anthology. This year, for the first time, we are nominating poems for the Best of the Net Anthology. This annual, awards-based literary anthology hopes to acknowledge and promote exceptional work (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art) that has been originally published online. That seems a good fit for Poets Online.

The Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize Anthology are two of the most prestigious and distinct literary awards for small presses, and they primarily differ in the medium they honor. Best of the Net is exclusively for work first published on the web or in an e-zine/digital format.

I appreciate that this anthology provides a platform for a diverse collection of writers and publishers who are shaping the online literary landscape, and brings greater respect to the continually expanding world of digital publishing, which often offers greater access to a wider array of voices than traditional print publishing.

We had five readers who went through published poems from July 2024 to June 2025. There were over 30 poems that received at least one nomination by a judge. Our six allowable nominations received the most mentions. 

Here are our nominations for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology:

LIBRARY GHOSTS by Rob Miller 
SPIRITING AWAY by Lynn White
ISLAND by Susan Spaeth Cherry  
AFTER THE BURIAL by Rob Friedman
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A CEMETERY by Taylor Graham
LETTING GO by Paul Hostovsky

The Best of the Net anthology is produced by Sundress Publications, a non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000 that is entirely volunteer-run. Sundress publishes chapbooks and full-length works in both print and digital formats, and hosts a variety of online journals. They are also the umbrella site for numerous publications, including the Best of the Net Anthology, Stirring, Rogue Agent, Doubleback Review, and beestung.