*Originally Published in the December 2022 Newsletter* What’s the point of a canon? There are those who would argue that a literary canon is exclusionary: it removes attention from the voices that are left out of it, while limiting full involvement in cultural discourse to those people who have sufficient access to education or leisure to absorb it. I prefer to consider the upside of a canon: its role as a shared language, a shared cultural inheritance. The more of it that people encounter, the better for them. The more we expand it to truly reflect our society—for instance, that half of people are women—the better for us all. At *The Pierian*, we hope to be doing our bit to nurture the canon. We love to publish poems that situate themselves in conversation with other poets, ancient and modern. And by reading blind, we aim to publish and give voice to new authors who we hope will go on to great success and join the modern canon.