We're open for poetry manuscript submissions!

It’s that time of year! River River’s summer reading period begins today and runs all month. Time to make those final revisions and send us your poetry manuscript.

We’re looking for two brilliant collections to add to our catalog. You can find full submission guidelines on our website, along with a model contract. We aim to be as transparent and accessible as possible in this process. We accept submissions via Duosuma (and the submission guidelines are posted there as well).

As the press has grown since our founding in 2022, the number of our submissions has increased each year. In an effort to manage the workload for ourselves (there are just two of us, and we read every submission), this year we’re open for one month only: May 1-31. Once the month is over, the window is closed. We won’t be accepting any late submissions.

We continue our policy of never requiring a submissions fee. We do accept tip jar donations with a submission. As a self-sustaining small press, we are grateful for the support we receive in this way, but it’s not a requirement to submit. We read all manuscripts with the same attention.

All donations we receive go directly to the costs of designing, printing, and distributing our books. Small presses and their authors depend on their communities, and we are ever so grateful for ours.

What are we looking for in a collection?

There’s not one single answer to this question. You can get a sense from the editors’ answers on our website. Certainly reading the books we’ve published will help you see poems and collections we’ve loved in the past. But honestly, there’s not a secret formula. We want to be blown away. We want to be surprised. We want to still be talking to each other days and weeks and months later about the poems. We want a book that we might not expect to publish based on an elevator pitch but then the poems turn out to be so good we have no choice.

So, you know, write your best book. Revise until it’s even better — and then send it our way! We can’t wait to read your work.