Submissions Open February 1, 2023. They’ll close on July 31, 2023
The Coop’s new theme will be “Tangible Action: Giving Names to the Nameless.” This site will begin to publish work under this theme in April 2023.
This theme, inspired by the words of Audre Lorde in her essay “Poems Are Not Luxuries,” calls for the necessary and urgent poems that will help us survive. We invite you to submit vivid poems that help us recover and renew our lives. We welcome poems from diverse voices. We consider the personal political. We welcome feminist work. We welcome anti-racist work. We hope to support many communities by sharing voices from varied experiences. In a time of pandemic, global warming, attacks on truth and the pillars of democracy, our ideas may feel both necessary and terrifying; we look for poems that validate us and awaken us.
Quality: Please send us your strongest work aiming for the most powerful poems you can write. We prefer imagistic poems that surprise and challenge. We look for poems that move us. We want lines we can quote.
Submission: Send Laura Lee Washburn no more than five poems and a 50-word third person bio note in a single Word or RTF document to KSPoetryCoop at gmail.com. Your single document must be formatted in this way: Your name at top left of the document (not in a header) followed by your email address, a list of the titles of the poems included in the document (also flush left; one title per line, no quote marks necessary, not numbered), bio note with no word “Bio:” in front of it, and then the poems exactly as you hope they will be printed–Please do not use special formatting, larger font, or all caps for titles. Bold is acceptable. In your bio note of no more than fifty words, feel free to include hyperlinks to your appropriate websites or books. We encourage hyperlinks. Please include italics as usual for magazines and books. Overall, do not use page breaks or other special formatting but instead leave about 4-5 lines between poems and a few lines between title and poem.
n.b.: With rare exceptions, we no longer re-publish previously published work. Previously-posted poems from personal sites are fine to submit. Poems that have appeared on sites that change content on a daily basis or who erase content after two months or less will also be considered so long as you own the rights and give us information on where the poem first appeared in a line after your bio.
Process: Laura Lee Washburn or an Assistant Editor will usually do the first reading, and will forward all poems she selects for our monthly editors to make final selections. If your poems are not selected, please don’t take offense: this is the nature of literary submissions. Monthly editors will contact you within the year if they select one or more poems to publish and they will ask that you send a jpeg photo or permission and a link to lift your photo from another site. Any poems they do not select will remain in our file for the next monthly editor to choose from. If, in the meantime, you publish the poem elsewhere, please tell us, and we will remove it from the selection possibilities.
Again, if an editor selects a poem, the other poems will remain in the editing stack for the next editors to review. We hope to announce any rejections no later than 3 months after formal close of submissions. If it takes longer, that simply means we have editors still reading.
Response Time: We tend toward longer response times because we have revolving monthly editors who need a strong group of poems from which to make selections. Our goal is to keep no poem longer than 8-10 months. That said, your poem might be taken as quickly as within a week. It just depends how many editors are reading for their months. Please be in touch if you need to withdraw a poem.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 