We are currently closed for poetry submissions. If you are interested in submitting a feature (e.g. an article, interview or essay), or writing a review for us, please click here.
On this page:
Before you submit
What are we looking for?
Send us work that is hard to decline. We want to accept your poems. We are happy when we open a document and find something which makes us applaud, laugh, cry, sing, dance or punch the air with triumph at your achievement. Please make our jobs easier by sending us poems to love, which make it impossible for us to click ‘decline’ or write ‘I’m sorry, but…’
Slants and themes
While we are always open to work on any subject that you are passionate about, for some issues we will be looking poems that fit a particular slant. This will always be included in the call-outs for each issue.
New writers
We want to unleash new writers on the world, and to represent as wide a range of writers as our page count will allow, so please don’t be put off if you are previously unpublished. We are just as happy to see poems by brand new writers as we are those by poets whose work we have loved over many years.
Do your research
A good piece of advice for any submitting writer is to read the magazine that you are submitting to – after all, the best way to know what someone’s looking for is to read what they’ve already published. Whether this is just reading our latest issue, or taking out a subscription, it is an excellent way of understanding the sort of work we accept. You’ll also be supporting the magazine this way too. Poetry Wales has a number of affordable subscription options, and is also stocked in some libraries. If a subscription or one-off issue is not accessible to you at the moment, you can also get an idea of the work we respond to by reading our How I Write a Poem interview series.
Submitting Your Work
You can send us your work via our portal on Submittable during the times that it is open. If Submittable is not accessible to you, email us at submissions@poetrywales.co.uk and we will work together to find an alternative.
In order to make sure that we are able to give each poem the time and consideration it deserves, our submissions portal will automatically close once we reach 550 entries.
Using Submittable
Many publications use Submittable as it is an easy way to submit and manage large volumes of work. If you are unfamiliar with Submittable, here are some user guides you may find helpful:
A few things to keep in mind
We don’t have many rules when it comes to submissions, but we do ask that you follow these conditions:
- Each poet can only submit one entry per window.
You may submit up to four poems within that entry. It doesn’t hurt to think about how these poems may complement each other, though we cannot guarantee that if we choose to publish you we will use more than one. - You don’t send us work that has been previously published.
Poems that you have shared on your social media are OK, but we cannot publish anything in our magazine that has previously been published by a third party – aka something that has been in an anthology, collection, or published on a website not belonging to you. - Poets who have been published in previous issues wait at least two issues to submit their work again.
While we will certainly want to see work from you again, we also want to be sure we’re making room for everyone and offering our readers a fresh range of voices.
Simultaneous submissions
While we would prefer that you not submit work to us that is already under consideration elsewhere, we understand that there are circumstances where this may happen. If you find out that something we are considering has been taken elsewhere, please let us know as soon as possible by emailing us at submissions@poetrywales.co.uk or by withdrawing the poem on Submittable.
What happens next?
We aim to let all poets know the outcome of their submission within five weeks of the submissions portal closing, and we will post updates to our submissions page if we anticipate a delay to this. While we understand that you might be keen to hear back sooner than that, we do ask that you are patient with us before this deadline.
If your poem is not accepted, please don’t be put off sending us work again in the future – we receive a lot of work, and have a limited page count, so sometimes we have to reject work that we really love simply because we don’t have the space. Our crowd-sourced series Overcoming Rejection offers practical and realistic advice from fellow writers on how to deal with rejection from magazines and publishers in general.
Acceptance and Publication
If we choose your poem for an upcoming issue, we will contact you to confirm that it is still available and unpublished, and send you a contract to sign with us.
At this stage, please note that we cannot accept any substantial changes to the work. It has been selected for a reason – have faith in it! We work to a tight deadline, and big changes at the proofing stage can impact the rest of the production schedule.
All contributors to the magazine receive a fee in line with our payment rates, as well as one complimentary print copy of the issue that their work is featured in.
Resources
For more general writing advice, check out our resource page for writers