Best New Poets is an annual anthology of fifty poems from emerging writers. The anthology began in 2005 and the book is currently distributed nationally as a University of Virginia Press title and produced in cooperation with Meridian, a semiannual literary magazine from the University of Virginia.

The anthology takes submissions from three sources:

• nominations from literary magazines in the United States and Canada,
• nominations from graduate-level writing programs in the United States and Canada, and
• entries from an annual open competition.

All entries go into a single blind pool where readers rank the submissions. A finalist pool of 150 to 300 poems then goes to a guest editor for review, and that guest editor selects the final fifty poems for the book.