Ways to Submit

We offer two yearly opportunities for publication —our Open Reading Period each winter, and Other Futures Award each summer. Please see our Submittable for submission guidelines!

Subscribe to our email list for more info about upcoming submission opportunities. 


Open Reading Period

Futurepoem welcomes unpublished, full-length manuscripts of poetry, prose, and multi-genre writing that challenge and expand on the potential for poetic form, language, content, and process. Work by underrepresented and emerging writers is especially welcome. Each year, we invite a rotating panel of distinguished guest editors to read and select new books for publication. The 2024 Open Reading Period is now closed for submissions. Our 2024 guest editors are Charles Theonia, Uljana Wolf, and Elisa Biagini. 

2023 OPEN READING PERIOD SELECTIONS

Slow Mania 
by Nazareth Hassan

The Downsides
by Ngozi “N/A” Oparah 

Author information below:

Nazareth Hassan is an interdisciplinary writer, director, musician, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Recent performances include #2112 at Center for Performance Research, Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and Untitled (1-5) at The Shed. Recent collaborators include Malcolm-X Betts, z tye, Tina Satter, Agnes Borinsky, and Alex Romania. Their performance score Untitled (1-5) was published by 3 Hole Press in 2022. They are a 2023-25 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.

Ngozi “N/A” Oparah is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer, researcher, and artist. Her other work has appeared in Fictional International, Madwomen in the Attic, Five:2 One, ANMLY, A Velvet Giant (Best of the Net Nomination), Foglifter (where she is currently prose editor), and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain; Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala, and HANGAR in Lisbon, Portugal. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a BS in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA where she teaches short form memoir and visual storytelling. She is currently studying towards a PhD in Creative Arts and Design that examines the roles of phenomenological, multidisciplinary narratives in improving mental health literacy. She has recently accepted an appointment as a lecturer in Creative Health at UCL. Her novella, Thick Skin, was published by KERNPUNKT Press and recognized by Lambda Literary and Big Other as one of April’s most anticipated books. She designs and facilitates creative writing and art workshops around the world. Find out more at naoparah.com.

 

2024 GUEST EDITORS

Uljana Wolf is a German poet, translator and essayist whose work explores the poetics and politics of translation and translingual poetics. She translates poets from English and other languages, such as Christian Hawkey, Erín Moure, Don Mee Choi, Eugene Ostashevsky, Valzhyna Mort and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. She teaches poetry and translation seminars at various institutions such as Pratt Berlin Program, Institut für Sprachkunst in Vienna, Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig. In 2019 she held the August-Wilhelm-von-Schlegel-Gastprofessur für Poetics of Translation at Freie University Berlin. In 2022 she curated the international literature festival Poetica VI in Cologne Sounding Archives – Poetry between Experiment and Document. Recent publications include: MUTTERTASK. Gedichte (2023), KOCHANIE TODAY I BOUGHT BREAD, Poems (transl. from the German by Greg Nissan, 2023); ETYMOLOGISCHER GOSSIP. Essays (2021 – forthcoming from Nightboat in 2025); SUBSISTERS: SELECTED POEMS (transl. from German by Sophie Seita, 2021), FALSE FRIENDS (transl. by Susan Bernofsky, 2013). After splitting her time between New York and Berlin, Wolf now lives and works in Berlin with her two daughters.

charles theonia is a poet from Brooklyn and a transsexual without direction. They're the author of Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax (Archway Editions, 2024), If a Piece Falls off the Poem, Keep It (Belladonna*, 2023) and other writings on zits, piss, and disco.

Elisa Biagini has published several poetry collections such as L’Ospite, (Einaudi, 2004), Fiato. parole per musica (D’If, 2006), Nel Bosco (Einaudi, 2007), The guest in the wood (Chelsea editions, 2013 - “2014 Best Translated Book Award”), "Da una crepa" (Einaudi, 2014), The Plant of Dreaming (Xenos books, 2017), Depuis une fissure (Cadastre8zero, 2018; Prix Nunc 2018), Filamenti (Einaudi, 2020), Filaments (Le Taillis Pré, 2022) and TRÅDAR (Bökforlaget Edda 2023).  Her poems have been translated into fifteen languages and she  has translated several contemporary American poets for reviews, anthologies and complete collections (Nuovi Poeti American Einaudi, 2006) as well as a selection of Paul Celan’s poems. She  teaches Writing at NYU Florence and is the artistic director of the international poetry festival “Voci Lontane, Voci Sorelle”


Other Futures

The Other Futures Award is given annually to an innovative, adventurous full-length work that challenges conventions of genre and language, content and form. We are interested in writing that imagines new lived or literary possibilities, and questions established paradigms. Visit our Submittable page for more information & to submit. 

The selected manuscript will receive publication with Futurepoem, an honorarium of $1000, a standard royalty contract, and 25 author copies.

Subscribe to our email list for more info about upcoming submission opportunities, or visit our Submittable page. 

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 We are so excited to announce the winner of the 2023 Other Futures Award: Isabel Sobral Campos for her book The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation.

Isabel Sobral Campos has published two full-length poetry manuscripts, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as the Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poems also have been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil). Her translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON is forthcoming in May 2024 with Ugly Duckling Presse. With her sister, she is a co-founder and editor of Sputnik & Fizzle press. She teaches at Northeastern University and lives in Cambridge, MA.

The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation is a book-length poem reflecting on the fraught colonial history of Portugal through a memoirist lens.

Past Selections

Selected to receive the 2022 Other Futures Award

(jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk 
makalani bandele

makalani bandele is author the poetry collections hellfightin’ (Willow Books, 2011), winner of the Integral Music Book Award, under the aegis of a winged mind (Autumn House Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. bandele’s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literary journals. His most recent poems, visual art, and essays can be found in or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Ocean State Review, Atticus Review, Poetry Northwest, theHythe, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a- Day. makalani is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem alum.

(jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a conceptual literary enterprise that imagines and recontextualizes for readers the Free Jazz performance of the fictional band jopappy & the sentence-makers. The poems and visual art in this book investigate anti-blackness, Western hegemonies, and the resilience and transcendence of Black culture. All the poems in this collection were written in a poetic form bandele invented called ‘the unit’, inspired by virtuoso pianist and composer Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures. The free jazz ethos and how it encourages polyvocality and a panoply of cultural and rhetorical references in a nonlinear, discordant, hermeneutically open modality make the unit arguably the first, self-consciously post-structuralist poetic form.

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Selected to receive the 2021 Other Futures Award

In Lieu of Solutions
Violet Spurlock

Violet Spurlock is a writer living in the Bay Area. Her published works include Alloyed Bliss (Eyelet, 2021) and VS VS VS (Gauss PDF, 2021). In addition to writing poetry, she also facilitates a writing group for trans authors and is currently at work on a novel. In Lieu of Solutions is her first full-length book. 

In Lieu of Solutions whirls in the vertigo of gender transition and cascades into a questioning of intimacy, identity, and hope, asking poetry for what it cannot give in order to study what it offers instead.

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Selected to receive the 2020 Other Futures Award

Flag
Imani Elizabeth Jackson

Imani Elizabeth Jackson is from Chicago. Her writings appear in and are forthcoming from Triple Canopy, Apogee, BOMB, Triquarterly, and elsewhere. She collaborates with S*an D. Henry-Smith as mouthfeel; their book Consider the Tongue engages histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. Imani is also a member of the Poetry Project’s 2019-2020 newsletter editorial collective and co-organizes the Chicago Art Book Fair. She lives in Providence now, where she's an MFA candidate at Brown.

Systems of domination seek to straighten land, to straighten people, to overdetermine place. In Flag, the poet imagines a river as these systems’ ruin; a river’s mouth deforming their lines and forming them anew.

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Selected to receive the 2019 Other Futures Award

Planet Drill
Jessica Laser

Jessica Laser grew up in Chicago. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and the chapbooks He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press, 2016) and Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (Catenary Press, 2015). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley. Planet Drill will be published in 2021.

Planet Drill pierces through language, using natural slippages between words—from line to lie—to reach the central myths of speech and selfhood. Does what we say make us who we are? By what authority? Insistent on uses for language beyond the descriptive, these poems let go of the narrative of the present in order to provide access to simultaneous, conflicting truths. The driving force behind Planet Drill is a belief in poetry’s unique ability to follow the ambiguities inherent in language toward a latent, revelatory clarity—one we might reach if only we stopped straining to be clear.