Codhill Press, currently celebrating its 25th year, wants your poetry manuscripts.
The press is excited to announce a new series designed to both honor its past and expand its poetry offerings into the future. Beginning this year, the press will name a Guest Editor who will select two poetry manuscripts for publication during a two-year appointment period (one per year). This new poetry series will join the long-running Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award to produce new books.
Poets are invited to submit full-length collections focused on a specific theme between May 1- June 30, 2023. In choosing a theme for submissions, the press will select an area that feels rich with possibility, representative of the Guest Editor’s interests, and open enough to allow for a wide range of interpretation.
For the 2023 submission period, the theme is: Dreams and the Subconscious. The submission call asks: “Where do dreams bleed into waking life? How do we maneuver the mundane with subconscious? How do we handle the anxieties of the world with dreams? We are interested in poems that share dreams in a tactile manner. Poems that explore the concrete world through the surreal touch of dreams. A dream presented with a skeleton of reality; reality handled with a cloak of a dream. Poems that use dreams not to escape the world around us—whether that is on a personal, communal, national, global levels—but to more fully understand it.”
Guest editors will be selected from past award winners. Robert Krut, who received the Codhill Award in 2018 for The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (and subsequently also published Watch Me Trick Ghosts with the press), will serve the inaugural post. Also the author of This Is the Ocean and The Spider Sermons, Krut is a long-time teacher of writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In discussing the Guest Editorship, Krut explains: “I’ve truly valued my experiences working with Codhill on my last two books, so I am particularly excited by this the opportunity to continue our relationship. And, this process also offers the opportunity to bring new writers into their orbit, which I’ve enjoyed so much.”
Krut expands on the press call by saying, “The approach of using a themed approach to submissions feels like a different way to find variety of fresh, unique collections. The hope is to experience the poetry, and the world at large, in a new way, however the collection chooses to do so under this umbrella of a theme. Like a dream, it has a breathing framework, an amorphous binding. We look forward to seeing poems that create their own context within it.”
Submission Guidelines for the Codhill Press Guest Editor Series follow:
- All submissions should be made through our submittable page.
- This series has a reading period, not a contest/competition. With your submission, please tell us a little about yourself, and share how your manuscript connects with the theme.
- Manuscripts should be between 48-80 pages long, not including front matter. Please include a table of contents; an acknowledgments page is welcomed but not required.
- There is no reading fee for submissions.
- The press is particularly interested in reading work by writers who have been historically underrepresented in, and/or marginalized by, traditional literary institutions.
- We welcome submissions from both emerging and established writers.
- Submissions will be accepted between May 1-June 30; the book selection will be announced by September 1, with publication the following year.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted; please contact the press immediately if the manuscript is no longer available.
- Books will be published by Codhill Press and distributed by Codhill and SUNY Press; authors will receive 20 copies of the collection and a contract.