Submit
Have your work published with Palette Poetry!
Featured Poetry
always free. always open.
Submissions for our Featured Poetry category are open year-round to poets at any stage of their careers. Featured poems are published online only and will spotlight a number of poems from new authors each month. We highly encourage emerging authors to submit.
We are thrilled to offer significant payment to our poets: $50 per poem, up to $150. We are proud to be able to pay our artists, but will be highly selective in our choices for publication.
We also warmly invite under-represented and marginalized voices to submit. Our aim is to be an accurate representation of the wonderful diversity of our community. Your voice is valued here, so to help do our part in moving forward the needle on equity in publishing, we've opened a special category for historically marginalized voices to send their work directly to our editorial team and receive a response within two to four weeks. More info here.
Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!
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Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English—other languages are welcome, as long as the poem is largely in English.
- We only accept unpublished work. If your poem has been published in a journal, on a blog, or on social media, it is not eligible.
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We accept simultaneous submissions, but please send us a message via Submittable if your work is picked up elsewhere—we want to say congrats!
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Send up to 5 poems that total no more than 10 pages.
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We do NOT accept multiple submissions for Featured Poetry. Please submit all your poems in ONE document.
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Multiple submissions will be declined unread.
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Please include a brief cover letter in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This is where you can include your name and/or bio! If you select the editorial feedback option, this is also where you can name which poem you'd like feedback on.
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Do NOT include your name or contact information in your packet of poems. We do not read submissions anonymously but prefer identifying information to be included in the cover letter, not the packet of poems.
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Expect 12 weeks for a response, but please do not query until 4 months have passed.
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We also offer two paid options for each submission: Fast Response & Editorial Feedback.
- Send us only your best. We will be extremely selective.
The Rising Poet Prize
We warmly invite all new and emerging poets to submit to The Rising Poet Prize! We will only accept submissions from poets who have not yet published a full-length collection at the time of submission. The winning poet will be awarded $3000, publication, and a brief interview in Palette Poetry. Second and third place will receive $300 & $200, respectively, as well as publication. The top ten finalists will be selected by Palette editors, and Guest Judge Maggie Smith will then select the winner and two runners-up from among the ten finalists.
Preorder Smith's forthcoming memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, today!
Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as well as Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally, and Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.” Smith’s next book, a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, will be published by One Signal/Atria in April 2023.
Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!
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For this prize, we are only accepting unpublished work from new and emerging poets: poets without a full-length collection published at the time of submission. Poets with no publication history are especially encouraged to submit. Poets with only chapbooks published are eligible. Poets with self-published full-length collections are ineligible.
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Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English—inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is largely in English.
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DO NOT INCLUDE your name or identifying information in the document OR submission title box. If your name is on the submission, in the file name, or in the title box, it will be automatically declined.
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We are only accepting unpublished work. If your poem has been published on a blog or on social media, it is not eligible.
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We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is picked up elsewhere.
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There is no page requirement, but your submission must be no more than three poems. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. Please begin each poem on a new page and include each poem's individual title.
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We do accept multiple submissions, but each submission will include the $20 reading fee.
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Please include a brief cover letter in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This is where you can include your name and/or bio! If you select the editorial feedback option, this is also where you can name which poem you'd like feedback on.
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NOTE: If after submitting you notice an error in your submission, please message us rather than withdrawing and resubmitting your submission. We can open it to editing once so you can correct the error.
- NOTE: Free submissions are available for one week only for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) poets. Please see Submittable for more information. Free entries close on February 22, 2023, after which point we cannot provide additional fee waivers.
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Contest closes on April 16, 2022.
Author’s Rights
Palette Poetry holds first publication rights for three months after publication, after which rights revert to the author. Authors agree not to publish, nor authorize or permit the publication of, any part of the material for three months following first publication. For reprints, we ask for acknowledgment of publication in Palette Poetry first.
For questions regarding submissions, please see our FAQ page.