For 2013, we’ll have a Kansas poem of the week on this site. If you would like your poem considered, please read these guidelines carefully and follow them:
- Email a word or RTF (rich text file) attachment with up to five poems to KSPoetLaureate@gmail.com. Please include a small jpeg photo of you and a 50-word-or-less bio about you. Note: Please include all poems and bio in one document.
- Poems are chosen based on their originality, freshness of language, craft, and whimsy of the editor.
- Anyone with ANY connection to Kansas may submit poetry. You could live here, have lived here, traveled through here, touched the other side of the street on State Line Rd. in Kansas City, or just read about Kansas, reveling in its mystic weather and surprising history.
- Poems need not be about Kansas, and in truth, please don’t submit poems with frequently-used Kansas images (windmills falling apart at the old homestead, for example, unless you’re doing something alive and new with the image).
- Previously-published poems are fine as long as the rights have reverted back to you, and we acknowledge where the poem was previously published.
- Poems will be arranged as much as possible to coincide with seasons and cycles.
- If your poem is chosen, Caryn will email you to let you know as well as the date your poem will be posted. Your poem, the photo and bio of you, will be posted together. Please know that this website formatting tends to mess up indented lines or very long lines, although Caryn will do her best to make your poem look as it should.
- If your poem isn’t chosen, Caryn will email you to let you know. Please: no pleading, arguing, name-calling or otherwise bad behavior. Please keep in mind that only 10% or less of all poems submitted will be chosen, and if yours isn’t, it’s not personal. Rejection is part and parcel of sending your writing out into the world, so just shrug, tell yourself there’s work to be done or the editor was blind to true genius, and keep writing.
