Thanks for checking out our resources page! The resources below have been made available to help you navigate and prepare for our annual contests and publications. These resources may also help you in preparing to submit your work to other publishers and contests.
Each of our contests and publications has unique guidelines to follow; however, this list of general guidelines will at least get you partway there.
Event-specific guidelines will be posted as each event is announced, so keep an eye out for those as they become available each year.
Currently, we have seven categories that we publish: poetry, short story, flash fiction, memoir, essay, novel excerpt, and miscellaneous nonfiction.
For each of these categories, we have defined five essential elements that are evaluated during judging, and we thought it might be nice to share those with you!
As you prepare to submit your work, take some time to evaluate it for yourself against our criteria and see how you measure up. Ensuring that you meet or exceed these criteria before you submit will increase your chances of success!
In the interest of total transparency, we offer a full explanation for how prizes are awarded in our annual poetry contest. Our contest is about celebrating poets, not just poetry, and we want to recognize a varied and diverse group every year. This policy explains how we do that as well as how prizes are awarded in the case of ties.
Curious about the punctuation, capitalization, formatting, and other rules we follow to make the anthology consistent and professional from cover to cover? Check out our style sheet, and feel free to follow these rules when setting up your entries for submission. But don’t feel obligated. Our style sheet is offered up as a reference only. We’ll ensure that all rules are followed (except where breaking them is more appropriate!) before publishing.