How To Submit Your Work

Heron Tree will be open for submissions from January 1 through June 1, 2016. Any submissions received outside this window will not be read.

Before submitting, please browse the archives and read about what we’re drawn to.

Simultaneous submissions are welcome with timely notification of acceptance elsewhere. Heron Tree is committed to being a means by which poems that have not yet been available online or in print become publicly available. To that end, work that has previously appeared online (temporarily or permanently, on your own or a third-party site) should not be submitted, nor should work that has already been published electronically or in print. Heron Tree does not publish translations, fiction, essays, or artwork at this time.

Submit 2 – 5 poems with a cover letter via email to submit.herontree@gmail.com. Include your cover letter in the body of the email and attach poems in a single doc or docx file. All submissions will be read blind; please do not include your name on the poems themselves, but provide a list of titles in your cover letter. Please do not use headers or footers in your file.

Accepted work will be published on the Heron Tree website and will be included in a yearly bound edition available as a print-on-demand volume. We are not currently able to provide contributing authors with a gratis copy of the volume, but we plan to make it available to them at minimal cost. Purchase of the print volume is not required for publication.

If your work is accepted by Heron Tree, you agree to grant us exclusive first publication rights and the non-exclusive right to include your work (online, electronically, and in print) in our archives and annual volume. You agree that if your poem subsequently appears elsewhere you will credit Heron Tree as the original publisher.

These guidelines are subject to change.