What makes a community? Before starting *The Pierian*, we met by phone with Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the longtime editor and publisher of a Maine-based print poetry journal we admired, *The Aurorean*. This journal had nurtured a community of New England-based writers. Poets gathered for readings at regional bookshops of note; Max read at one at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts that honored the memory of Donald Hall. Also in that time before our first issue, Max had been quite involved with the Burlington Writers’ Workshop here in northwestern Vermont. Writers from that group formed the core of a multi-week virtual seminar we gave on the lyric tradition. Our concepts of community were connected to real-world spaces and groups of people here in New England, and we envisioned our own journal as providing a space for those writers. As it has turned out, however, our online presence and the nature of community in the twenty-first century have conspired to create a very different result. We now communicate with and publish poets living all over the globe, celebrating a richer variety of landscapes, traditions and poetic forms than we could have imagined. This fact became quite evident when we recently shipped orders of the second print omnibus edition of *The Pierian*. Since we operate without reading cover letters, this is one of the few times that we become aware of contributors’ personal details, such as where they live and write. It was fascinating to realize that our journal has become a truly international endeavor. In our two years of publication, we have printed works by poets residing in 8 nations: Canada, Denmark, India, Ireland, Italy, UAE, the UK, and the US. Within the United States, our published poets resided in 18 states: Arizona, California, DC, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. So as we look ahead to 2025, we raise a toast to our far-flung contributors. We hope to keep providing a home for interesting and varied voices!