Veterans Poetry Project Publishes Anthology

Poet Laureate Mattie Smith Started Project

Rockbridge County resident Michael Lennon sat in Richmond’s Visual Arts Center and listened to fellow veterans read their poems on June 27. Poets spoke about freedom, uncertainty and pain.

“You would never realize that they have these experiences and these thoughts and this ability to express themselves,” Lennon said.

Then, he read a poem of his own.

“Well they served their country,” Lennon’s poem “Red and Blue” began. “The country didn’t serve ‘em back.”

Lennon, a former Marine, is one of almost 60 poets featured in the new anthology “Perseverence and Resilience: Poems from the Veterans Poetry Project.” The ceremony in June celebrated its release.

The book was edited by Mattie Quesenberry Smith, Virginia’s poet laureate and an English professor at Virginia Military Institute. Smith’s Veterans Poetry Project has also included a series of in-person workshops and a poetry contest.

“It all just came together, and it coalesced, and I was able to do it,” she said, “and I’m now thankful.”

‘Space For Veterans’ When Smith first became the state poet laureate in 2024, she said she didn’t know where to start. She said the poet laureate’s role isn’t clearly defined and can vary from poet to poet.

“I wanted to do some type of civic project, but I wasn’t sure what,” she said.

Smith said she got the idea to focus on veterans from Wayne David Hubbard, a poet and Marine Corps veteran who had done volunteer archival work at the National Archives. Hubbard told Smith he had noticed that there weren’t many veterans writing poetry.

“There’s not a lot of space for veterans in the literary world,” said Jeffrey Beck, who has three poems in the new anthology. “There’s not a lot of books, there’s not a lot of memoirs, there’s not a lot of fiction. There certainly isn’t a lot of poetry.”

The conversation with Hubbard inspired Smith to start the Veterans Poetry Project. She applied for a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and received one for $50,000 in July 2025.

Smith said she wasn’t allowed to use the whole $50,000 for the project because of the way the fellowship is designed. Some of the money also went toward her personal expenses.

“As far as the project’s concerned, I was limited to around $15,000,” Smith said.

In addition to the funding given directly to Smith, the fellowship also gave out matching grants to pay community partners who provided space, labor or other contributions to the project.

‘Coming and going’

To reach veterans, Smith organized poetry workshops across Virginia. She said she had planned to hold 30 total workshops in each of 10 regions of the state. But things didn’t work out that way.

“Some of the workshops, we set up and they had no attendees,” she said.

Attendance was low overall, Smith said. She said she didn’t have exact numbers but estimated the workshops reached only about 30 people in total. Attracting veterans in Southwest Virginia was especially difficult.

She said the online workshops are a way to make up for the low turnout at in-person sessions. Currently, six veterans “come and go” at weekly online meetings.

Beck, who has been participating in the online workshops for several months, said the sessions bring together a diverse group of veterans.

“There’s service veterans, combat veterans. There’s old veterans and young veterans,” he said. “It’s been a nice mix over the past 13 weeks of different people coming and going.”

Beck said workshops typically begin with a poem that the veterans read. They discuss the poem with Smith, then she gives them a prompt and they write poetry of their own.

“It’s been refreshing,” Beck said. “Because now every week I come away with a new project.”

The Veterans Poetry Project also featured a poetry contest run through Submittable. Steven L. London won first place, while Mike Lynch got second and Richard L. Matta was third.

The prizewinners were honored at an event in November. All three have their poems in the new anthology.

What’s next?

Smith said that now, she’s looking ahead. She wants to see the project under a more sustainable leadership structure, either as part of a federal or state department or its own nonprofit.

“There a couple of ways that this might find a home,” she said Beck said he hopes more people will engage with the project in the future.

“It’s not as rigid and formal and stuffy as you might think it is,” he said. “Anything you write can be poetry. Anything creative that you put out that expresses the experiences you’ve been through is worthy.”