Poetry Bulletin: March 2025
Good update on fee support, National Poetry Series, and March deadlines
Hi poets — first, fellow U.S. poets, please join me in reaching out to your Congress people and demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil. If you want a starting point, tools like Five Calls can help… imperfect action, persistent action, refusal-to-go-quietly action, together-action is all we have. Don’t assume a D or R next to your senator’s name means they’ve got your back and don’t need a call. I’ve got Sen. Peters (D) and Sen. Slotkin (D) here in Michigan and do not feel represented by or safe in their silence on this.
And next, I’m hoping this will be a little good news in these bad news days… thanks to folks supporting the Poetry Bulletin with paid subscriptions, the submission fee fund can reach more poets than usual this spring.
Until now, you’ve been able to get support for three submissions, and that was a lifetime maximum. A “one and done” kind of support.
Going forward, as long as there’s still support from paid subscriptions to back it, I’m changing the limit to be a max of three submissions, per poet, per year.
So if you received support in other years, you can get support again this year. How this works:
Fee support is confidential.
It covers a max of three submissions per poet, per year, as funds are available.
Open to poets submitting poetry CHAPBOOKS or FULL-LENGTH poetry collections.
Try to email at least one week before your deadline. My inbox is a loud place and I struggle to keep up, so I can’t help with last-minute deadlines.
I can get you funds via Paypal, and only to your personal Paypal account. (Last month’s bulletin shares more about why that is.)
Just drop me an email with where you’re submitting and the fees.
Thank you—
As of today 157 people support this work with paid subscriptions, and the project reaches 5,500 poets.
Thank you to everyone who chips in, passes these tools along to poets who need them, shares updates on publishers, mentions the project in interviews, chats with me about collaboration, and more… thank you to everyone moving in/for/with a sense of community now.
💚
Emily
(p.s. personal update) The past year and a half-ish has been tricky for my own writing, with the tough things happening in my family and in communities like this one… I’ve found poetry hard to come by. So I started trying other forms to keep my hands moving, and it’s led to a mix of language and linocut printmaking. It’s kind of been my secret art that’s become a core practice, and I’m ready (mostly ready?) to start sharing it now.
National Poetry Pay-to-Play Series
The National Poetry Series has a deadline in March and is the least accessible publishing opportunity out of the 170+ deadlines this project tracks.
I had an exchange with them last year about fee accessibility and waivers, and they said they won’t change course unless they see a decrease in submissions.
If you want to be in solidarity with poets who are excluded from publishing, please consider if you really want to share your work and submission fees with the National Poetry Series this year. If you opt out, you can drop them an email here to let them know why you’ve withheld your submission.
a little inspiration
Gabriel Cortez on Nikki Giovanni and poetry albums: “I come from an era where poets were more likely to hand you a burned CD instead of a chapbook after the show. A small stack of paper and plastic sleeved treasures still sits nestled next to my jewel-cased copy of De La Soul’s ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ (did someone say Ego Trippin?). Yet, it wasn’t until I listened to Nikki Giovanni’s 1971 album that I realized just how great a poetry album could be.”
More potential for poetry in other forms: free comics workshops about connection and grief . . . we’ve got new sharing on the way here at the Bulletin (kind of like this earlier care package on query letters) about getting your poetry out there beyond the traditional container of a book, and I’d love to share more along these lines this year. Drop a comment if you have resources or inspiration to share!
YK Hong and Liberation Toolbox are definitely worth a follow if you’re learning about surveillance culture and thinking about your online footprint.
Upcoming Deadlines for Poetry Manuscripts
Between now and mid-April, there are seven reading periods with presses that do not exclude poets based on their ability to pay. As in: they either charge no submission fee, or if they charge a fee, they offer fee waivers or support.1
Note that last I checked, none of these have committed to PACBI.
March 14 — Carcanet Books — free submissions
March 15 — Word Works Washington Prize — fee waivers available by emailing: editor@wordworksbooks.org (FYI: limited waivers are available and may already have been used up, since this deadline was also shared last month)
March 31 — Clash Books — free submissions
March 31 — Airlie Prize — fees waived for BIPOC writers
March 31 — Steel Toe Books — fee waivers available, request guidelines by messaging the publishers on social media (but also a word of caution on this press)
March 31 — Four Ways Book Levis Prize — I’m mentioning this one, but their website says the fee waiver limit has been met.
April 15 — Vanderbilt University Literary Prize — fee waivers available, capped at 25.
Why PACBI?
If you’re submitting and writing in solidarity with those facing genocide, PACBI is one clear way to find publishers who are in the work too. Publishers for Palestine and Writers Against the War on Gaza have lists of presses committed to PACBI. We know boycotting and protesting works—check out the recent example of the Giller Prize. Don’t be afraid to ask a potential publisher where they stand before you trust them with your work.
The bulletin is made by Emily Stoddard, and the big list of poetry publishers came together as she found a publisher (Game Over Books) for her poetry debut, Divination with a Human Heart Attached. If you have updates to a publisher’s listing or want to share a resource, leave a comment. Comments are preferred to email replies when possible, as they get the information out to everyone more freely and quickly.
Publisher eligibility for inclusion/waive-to-play: There will be no more free advertising in these monthly posts for publishers excluding the poets who can’t pay to play.
The monthly bulletin reaches over 5,000 subscribers and generates views well beyond that (almost 13,000 in the past 30 days). This project consistently sends traffic to presses and submission opportunities—very likely giving a nice bump to submissions made and submission fees paid.
So, in the spirit of those presses who say they depend on exclusionary submission practices to survive, it’s time to adjust the cost of admission to the Poetry Bulletin.
These monthly updates are now a waive-to-play opportunity. If a press wants to be read by this audience, they can offer zero-fee reading periods, fee waivers for poets who need them, or other creative options, as shared in this newsletter many times.
Wow thank you for the shoutout!