General Submission Guidelines

General Submission Guidelines:
These are guidelines that apply to everything you submit. Check individual projects to see if there are additional guidelines.

Always, always write a cover letter. However, unless you know one of us personally, do not address us personally.

Please send a brief biographical statement with each submission. This should be neither your life history nor a list of every ezine, zine, and magazine that has ever published your work. A couple of credits is fine, and so is mentioning your hometown. But we don’t need to know how your first pet died or how many poems you’ve published. Why? Because we aren’t going to judge you by your bio. We are going to judge you by your work.

We prefer electronic submissions. And we prefer that you send them as a single attachment. Do not send us 10 poems as 10 different attachments. Do not send us your poems in one attachment and a cover letter in another one, and a bio in yet a 3rd. That drives us insane.

If you cannot submit electronically, type your poems in a normal font, at 10-12 point, and in black ink on white paper. Do not staple pages together. Do not scribble on pages, or put sticky notes all over the place explaining things to us. In other words, send us clean copies on white paper and leave the other stuff out. Send us only what we ask for.

Don’t fold things up and stuff them in tiny envelopes.

We recycle stuff. All you’re getting back from us is a publishing agreement or a rejection letter. No funny business.

Basically, what this boils down to is this: When you send us stuff, be reasonable. Print it on white paper, make it legible, make us want to read your work and like it. Surprise us. Be brief and to the point, and fabulous. We’ll get along just fine.