SUBMISSIONS OPEN MARCH 10 - APRIL 10, 2026

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES          

Our reading period is an open process. Our group of initial readers and guest editors will have access to your cover letter and know your name when reading your work. Each year, we invite a rotating panel of distinguished guest editors to read submitted work and, in collaboration with our core editors, select two books for publication. All submissions are read by initial readers who then recommend a limited group of manuscripts to the guest editors. The guest editors also have input into the group of final manuscripts that are considered. Manuscripts must be unpublished book-length works of poetry, prose, or multi-genre work.          

We welcome international submissions originally written in English. However, we cannot currently accept work translated into English from other languages. We are open to unpublished work that incorporates other languages, or self-translated work. We welcome unpublished book-length collaborative writing but we do not currently accept anthology submissions. Work previously published in chapbook form is fine, as long as the manuscript in its entirety has not been published in its current form. And though we are open to books with visuals, books that are heavily image-based may be better served by a different publisher. Authors of books Futurepoem has published and previous winners of Futurepoem's Other Futures Award are ineligible. If your work engages with AI, please disclose its use in your submission cover letter or notes, just as you would cite any other source. If your work or process does involve AI, we are particularly interested in work that engages with it critically. Any undisclosed use of AI to generate or substantially alter your work will result in disqualification.         

You may submit work previously submitted to Futurepoem, as our guest editors shift every year. Our 2026 guest editors are Cole Swensen, Brandon Brown, and Cristina Pérez Diaz. You may only submit one manuscript to this call. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we do ask that you notify us or withdraw your manuscript via our online submissions system if your book is accepted elsewhere. This year, we are instituting a submission cap of 350 submissions — we're a small team, and we want to make sure that each submission gets careful attention. Submission length: 50 – 200 pages. There is a sliding scale administrative/processing fee for each submission.*          

* Our $10 fee supports a higher honorarium for our guest editors, the rising administrative costs of our review process, and our continued use of Submittable. Our goal is to maintain our open submissions period as an accessible opportunity for writers. In case this fee represents a hardship to you, we've instituted an option for a reduced fee of $7. Additionally, there is an option to submit and sponsor someone else's submission for $15.

HOW TO SUBMIT + DEADLINE          

We will accept manuscripts via our online submissions system from March 10 to April 10, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. E.S.T. We are only able to accept online submissions, so please do not send hard copy submissions via regular mail. We may request hard copies of your manuscript for further consideration, so please include your email, phone number and address so that we can contact you. In order to keep this opportunity open to the maximum number of writers, we are only accepting one submission per writer.       

SELECTED MANUSCRIPTS          

We will select two books for publication as part of the Futurepoem book series. The intended publication year for these books is 2028. Our goal is to try to announce selections for publication by the end of July 2026. Because we are a small organization with limited resources we are not able to provide feedback on submissions.