Open Competition:

From April 15 to June 1 of each year, any poet meeting our eligibility requirements may nominate their own work by sending us a submission containing two poems. Each submission requires a reading fee of $3.50, which goes toward paying our readers and also helps us award each poet selected from the Open Competition five copies of the anthology.

Unlike prior years when our entry fee was higher ($8), poets entering the 2009 Open Competition will NOT receive a copy of the anthology in the mail. Instead, we thought most of you would prefer to pay less to submit work initially, and simply buy a copy later on if you choose to do that. We'll offer that discounted version to you after final selections are made and announced.

All entries for the Open Competition will be through ManuscriptHub.com and require a credit card for payment. That system will begin taking entries for Best New Poets between April 15 and June 1, 2009. Poets may enter multiple times (for example, a poet might send in two submissions [2 poems in each, or 4 poems total]), but we have generally found that a "shotgun" approach of entering many, many times does not help. If your first one or two submissions don't make it past our readers, it is doubtful a third one will. Poets nominated by magazines or writing programs may also submit through the Open Competition.

We judge all entries blindly, so Open Competition entries are mixed in with nominations from literary magazines and writing programs. Our readers have no real way of knowing which source an entry comes from and we don't prioritize one entry source over another. The significant number of Open Competition selections each year tends to reflect that: we do our best to judge each poem on its own terms. We will always publish at least five writers from the Open Competition, but we are likely to publish many more. In our 2005 edition, 24 of the 50 poets came from the Open Competition; in 2006, the number rose to 28; in 2007, it went to back to 24.