A Letter to a Young Plagiarist

We were lucky enough to publish many wonderful poems in 2024, but one of them certainly caught your eye. We confirmed recently through a simple Google search that you, a young university student, had stolen and badly mangled one of our writers’ pieces just months after they published with us.

Plagiarism can be tricky to detect at first – we have a lot of sympathy for journals who unknowingly publish plagiarized work. But once there is suspicion of plagiarism, it becomes very easy to find more examples of it in your name. In this instance, it took about ten minutes to discover we had a serial plagiarist on our hands: another piece from a different author ripped off and published in a subsequent issue of the same unsuspecting journal.

Imagine admiring someone’s work well enough to steal it, and then imagine that writer you admire getting a call from an editor who’d discovered obvious evidence of plagiarism you committed. Editors and writers talk – none of this happens in isolation. And when it does happen, it often happens all at once. A poem you lifted months or years ago can trigger an avalanche of discovery that can all but bury your career as a writer. We don’t care if it was AI that got away from you or a more deliberate smash-and-grab: as editors, we must protect the work of writers who publish with us.

Next we reached out to the journal who published the stolen pieces, which in this case was a journal affiliated with your university. Contact information with the journal wasn’t easy to find, so we went straight to the chair of the English department. They did right by us and started the process of taking the stolen poems down. We subsequently read the university’s posted policies about plagiarism and academic dishonesty, and through those policies we gleaned an awful sense of how much difficulty and embarrassment this must have cost you. The section on revoked scholarships was particularly upsetting. We hope it didn’t come to that.

We and the poet whose work you vandalized have decided not to name you, and we’ve decided not to name your school (who, again, did nothing but right by us). Naming and shaming can be a deterrent in theory, but after carefully weighing the particulars we decided that naming you on social media would have felt too much like punching down. But please, in the future, do not give random lit journals this kind of power over you. You’re really bad at this – you clearly had no idea how lightly you covered your tracks, or how much worse you made the original poems for hacking away at them.

The worst part is that your own worthy heart was right there the whole time, just begging to be interpreted and heard. We hope you have a redemption arc ahead of you, kid. One you write yourself.