Poets & Writers

The same editors who compile Grants & Awards, the most comprehensive and accurate listings of writing contests available in print, now offer a weekly guide to literary competition, delivered directly to your inbox. • Roundups of upcoming deadlines• C

ABOUT NINETY PAGES INTO JULIA PHILLIPS’S NEW NOVEL, Bear, I encountered one of those put-down-the-book- and-stare passages that anyone who is passionate about reading and writing savors. This particular paragraph concerns the two sisters at the novel

Editor in Chief KEVIN LARIMER  Senior Editor  JEN DEGREGORIO Senior Editor EMMA KOMLOS-HROBSKY  Production Editor  MARVA SHI Features Editor INDIA LENA GONZÁLEZ Associate Editor  KAREN NG Assistant Editor  LUCIANO GRIGERA NAÓN  Art Director  MURRAY G

Research more than 200 agents with our carefully curated Literary Agents database, which contains contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips, and more. Read every installment of our long-running series Agent Advice, which includes

Feedback from readers I appreciated Philip Metres’s passionate and nuanced take on the Israel-Gaza disaster (“In This Time of War: The Muses Refuse Silence,” May/June 2024). I am a Jew who believes that, given the oppression and murder Jews have endu

MICHAEL BOURNE is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. His debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, was published by Regal House in 2022. JENNIFER DE LEON is the author of the YA novels Borderless (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2024) and Don’t

“Out of habit, I search the shore/for bodies.” A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, July 2024) by Faylita Hicks. Second book, poetry. Agent: Annie Hwang. Editor: Maya Marshall. Publicist: Aricka Foreman. “Robert liked to quote Ingmar Bergman: ‘An artis

Publishing can be an opaque industry with its difficult-to-navigate network of publishing houses, editors, and agents. It has been particularly opaque for BIPOC people who have been historically under-represented in an industry that has been dominate

Paul Auster Lynne Reid Banks Kate Banks John Barth Kathryn Bevis Yorick Blumenfeld Neeli Cherkovski Michael Coady Joel Conarroe Maryse Condé Shirley Conran Alta Gerrey Lesley Hazleton Michael Heffernan Nicholas Jacobs Dmytro Kapranov Sami Michael Ali

Seventeen years ago a group of poets decided they wanted to support poetry from the Pacific Northwest using the model of a publishing collective, forging a strong community in which the members were bound to one another’s success. Together they found

When Shze-Hui Tjoa started writing her debut memoir, The Story Game (Tin House, May 2024), she was interested in exploring people and places that “looked aspirational but were actually problematic within.” Essays from the book, for example, dissect b

Artistic community is at the core of this new craft book about the artist’s life and work over time by author and critic Stacey D’Erasmo, whose novels include the Lambda Literary Award–winning A Seahorse Year (Harcourt, 2004) and Wonderland (Harcourt

THREE times a week, at three different juvenile detention centers in and around Saint Louis, I volunteer to lead writing workshops for the kids who are incarcerated there. They range in age from thirteen to seventeen; like me, most of them are Black.

FEW events create more stress at writers conferences and workshops than agent speed-dating sessions. These short one-on-one meetings can be great opportunities to discuss your literary work with literary agents and have personalized, specific convers

ONE part of my job (and a part that I am constantly trying to find more time for) is e-mailing prospective authors. While the majority of my clients do come to me via the “slush pile”—the unsolicited queries writers send to me—sometimes I write to th

WRITERS expend so much time, energy, and sanity trying to land an agent that they often forget to consider what happens if they succeed. Sure, the basics of the business arrangement—the percentages, the exclusivity, and so on—are right there in the c

AFTER the years we writers spend toiling on our books and working to get them published, the moment they finally enter the world is beyond exhilarating. When my first book was released I, like many authors, assumed local indie bookstores—those bastio

It’s not hard to find an agent’s e-mail address on the internet. In fact, most agents intentionally make this easy so you can send them a query for your next great book. But what happens after you hit Send? Is an agent actually going to read that e-m

AFTER years of writing, revising, and submitting, after loads of rejections and months of self-doubt, the miracle has happened: You signed with an agent. Your book is one enormous step closer to publication. Most likely there is more revising to conq

AS THE editor in chief of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, an annual literary magazine supported by Fairfield University in Connecticut, I spend a lot of time staring at submissions. Most come through an online submission manager, but every su

A prize of $1,000 and publication in A Public Space is given annually for a work of flash fiction about teachers and school, in which the protagonist or narrator is a K–12 teacher. Using only the online submission system, submit a story of 6 to 749 w

Jules Fitz Gerald of southern Oregon won the 2024 “Stories Out of School” Flash Fiction Contest for “Orientation.” She received $1,000 and publication in A Public Space. Karen Russell judged. The annual award is given for a work of flash fiction abou

LEDBURY POETRY Ledbury Poetry Competition COMSTOCK REVIEW Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award GHOST STORY Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition PULITZER PRIZES Prizes in Books RATTLE  Poetry Prize THE WORD WORKS Tenth Gate Prize NARRATIVE Poetry Contes

The Arteles Creative Center’s Silence Awareness Existence Residency Program offers one-month residencies to poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and translators from January to March in the countryside region of Hämeenkyrö, Finland. Each resid

“Considering who we honor tonight, this is a gathering devoted to the principles and the practical politics of freedom, particularly the freedom to write, to publish, to read,” said host David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, upon welcoming guests