Submissions Are Open
The Coop’s new theme will be “Tangible Action: Giving Names to the Nameless.” This site will begin to publish work under this theme soon.
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. The Coop’s Mission is for social justice. We welcome poems from diverse voices. We fully support bodily autonomy. We welcome poems by marginalized voices. We hope to be inclusive in the best sense and welcome feminist work, work by queer poets (LGBTQ+), anti-racist work, and work that enjances our consciousness around varied communities, and around the natural world and environment. We consider the personal political. In a time of 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, underline, 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.
Response Time: We sometimes tend toward longer response and we are currently in process of adding editors. 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 