The New Yorker’s loss is The Good Men Project‘s gain! Send us your rejected poems!
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So you’re one of the 75,000+ people who submitted their poetry to The New Yorker. You waited a few months, and then found that you’re one of the approximately 74,950 people whose work they rejected. It’s not that the poems you submitted were bad; they just “weren’t right” for them. You knew the odds were overwhelmingly against you from the start, but it still stings.
The Good Men Project realizes that a lot of the material that gets rejected from preeminent publications is gold, so we want to celebrate it—and perhaps, assuage some of that sting. Send us your best work that has been rejected by one or more of the “holy grails” in the poetry publishing biz: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, or The American Poetry Review.
Once we have received a critical mass of submissions, we will run a special “Rejected by…” series on the website. Let’s show the top dogs of the industry what they’re missing!
***Please note that we will still be accepting general submissions in poetry. For general guidelines, visit here.
To submit to our special “Rejected by…” theme, please observe the following guidelines:
1) Submit up to 10 pages of poetry, single-spaced. Please do not place more than one poem on a single page. All poems submitted to “Rejected by…” MUST have been rejected by one of the publications listed above.
2) All submissions should be sent to [email protected]. All files should be sent as .doc, .docx, or .rtf. At the top of the first page, please include your full name, email address, and the date of the submission. Name the document “Your Name Poetry Submission.”
3) In your email write a cover letter which tells us which poems were rejected by which publication(s) and, if you can, an approximate date you received the rejection.
4) Please include in your submission a 2-3 sentence bio and have an author photo uploaded on Gravatar.com. In your cover letter, let us know the email attached to the Gravatar account. A Gravatar account is necessary to create an “About the Author” box on the page, should your poem(s) be accepted.
5) Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know right away if a poem or poems is accepted elsewhere.
6) Previously-published material is acceptable, but you must include all appropriate credits and links back to the original.
7) We will try to respond as quickly as possible. If you haven’t gotten a response after a month, feel free to send an email inquiring on the status of your submission.
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