Since we have no way of knowing who you are, we hope this message finds you. If you are one of the poets who has submitted work to us by regular mail, we can only promise to read them whenever it is safely possible to do so. All the mail is being held in a central site. When the university shut down, we could no longer get mail. Each year we have some people, like those who are incarcerated, who have no other means of sending us work.Ĭurrently, we have no access to any submissions received by mail since early March. We often agonize over our choices.ĭespite our primary shift to online submissions, we have continued to accept regular mail submissions in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible. We only accept a tiny percentage of the submissions we receive, so each year we find ourselves rejecting many excellent poems. We also made the decision to shift our editorial processes to blind review–to further support our long-standing mission statement to “publish poems, not poets.” As poets ourselves, we are always committed to making the process as fair as it can be.

We understand that some people find the system impersonal, and we still strive to make our interactions with every one of our poets as humane and attentive as possible.

We have never used the system to “make a profit”–charging no more than we absolutely have to in order to pay for the platform. When we shifted our preferred submission mechanism to Submittable, we received some emails expressing concern about that decision.

The rumpus submissions