Note: These are the submission guidelines for books of poetry. If you wish to have your artwork considered for showing in the gallery, please see those guidelines.
Our Mission: Publish Poetry That Needs To Be Published.
We recognize that excellence can be produced by poets of all age groups, even the very young, and we seek to encourage the spread of that recognition through a focus on the merits of the poem as it stands alone.
What makes us unique is that we strive to forge close relationships with our writers. Paper Kite Press can and will collaborate with the writer to edit and choose pieces for the manuscript, design the cover and createbooks that both artist and publisher can be proud of having produced. Because quality poetry and books are so important to us, we publish only four to six manuscripts per year.
Submission Guidelines
Most of the books published by PKP are done by invitation of the press. We are, however, open to unsolicited manuscripts on a rolling basis.
If you would like to submit, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the books on our list to make sure that your work is a good fit. Show that you know what we do and that you support it by buying one of our titles.
We look for excellent poetry, with a leaning toward visual, experimental and new forms, but there are no fixed “styles” that we publish. If you are considering sending us a manuscript, please take the time to review the following checklist.
While this is by no means a complete set of guidelines, we hope it will give you some idea of the kinds of poetry that has the best chance of being published by PKP. It is not our intention to suggest that any one kind of poetry is any better than any other, merely to indicate the types of poetry that appeal most to our editors in the hopes of making the submission/selection process easier for everyone concerned.
PKP LIKES: Forms, Experimental work, Pablo’s lemons, Subversive, Visual, Concrete, Sneak attack, Found poems, Collaborative, Contemporary.
We Don’t Like: Hallmark verse, Gothic verse, MFA workshopped poems, the word “soul” in poems, Abstract, Sentimental, Mannered, Medieval, Fantasy, Jotted on the back of a paper napkin during an open poetry reading and declared “finished.”
If your answer is “Yes!” to most of the listings in the PKP LIKES list, send us your manuscript! Please allow up to three months for us to review your work.
A manuscript that is all the things “We Like” is not guaranteed to be accepted, and a manuscript that contains things “We Don’t Like” is not necessarily unacceptable; these are merely guidelines to help you determine if you wish to submit a manuscript for consideration.
To submit:
- We prefer electronic submissions. Please send your manuscript as one single document in one of the following formats (in descending order of preference): .pdf, .rtf, .txt, .doc). If you are unable to submit electronically, please send a copy of your manuscript to 443 Main Street, Kingston, PA 18704 USA.
- Please do not include a literary CV listing your previous publications or relevant experience. We publish poems, not poets.
- If you would like your manuscript back, please enclose a large enough self-addressed envelope with adequate postage. If you don’t want your MS back, a small stamped envelope or e-mail address is fine.
- Be patient. We try to respond promptly, but we do receive many submissions, so it may take us several months to get back to you.