We have recently changed our submission timelines – we are now accepting poetry submissions all year round! When the submission period closes for one issue, we’ll immediately open submissions for the next.

Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to learn about the title and theme for each issue, and keep an eye our on submission page for updates to our guidelines.

Nope! All issue submissions are absolutely free and always will be.

You can also submit to our 5 Line Features for free – you just need to sign up to our newsletter first.

Our competition entries require a small processing fee. This helps cover our operating costs.

If your work is selected for publication, we will email you an offer outlining the terms of our agreement.

If you accept, you agree to give us first rights to publish your poetry in our digital journal. Once published, all rights revert back to you, the writer.

If your work is not selected for our journal, all rights remain with you.

Due to European data laws, you must be over 18 to submit to our journal.

Whether your poetry has been accepted or not, we’ll send you an email with an update about the status of your submission ahead of the publication date.

The email will come from team [at] free-the-verse.com, so if you’re worried about missing it you can add us to your contacts.

We’ll let you know the date of publication in the initial email offer, and on the day of publication you will receive another email with the news that the issue is live.

We’ll also announce it on our socials and in our email newsletter.

As a brand new journal, we aren’t currently in a position to offer compensation to our poets for publication in our issues. We’re working on moving toward a model where we can do this, as we’d love to be able to support the poets who generously share their work with us.

For now, we ensure that every poet who is published with us has ample opportunity to build an presence in the online poetry scene through our community, by honouring their poetry with beautiful issues, inviting them to partake in our Poet Interviews, sharing snippets of their work on our socials and promoting them in our newsletter.

Beyond issue submissions, we’ve recently introduced a poetry competition, which awards $100 to the winning poet.

Our most urgent priority is to cover our website fees, so we can continue to stay afloat and keep Free the Verse online.

If you’d like to support our goals, please consider donating. If you’re not in a position to donate, you can still support us by sharing our journal with friends and family.

You can submit a maximum of 3 poems for each issue, so 12 poems per year.

We don’t have a limit for our 5 Line Features newsletter segment – you can submit as many poems as you like, just make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter first!

If your poem is not accepted for a previous issue, you are welcome to submit it to the next issue, and so on.

It is often the case that a poem we love simply doesn’t fit thematically with the other poems we have selected for an issue, and we’ll absolutely consider publishing it in a different issue.

In the past we have published poetry about sensitive topics, and you are welcome to submit such poems.

However, out of consideration for the volunteers who read our submissions, please consider using trigger or content warnings as you see fit.

Absolutely.

As a small team we are unable to provide feedback for the poetry we have not selected for publication. Generally speaking, we don’t select a poem for publication if it doesn’t fit thematically with the other poems we’ve chosen for publication in a given issue.

Furthermore, we don’t believe our personal preferences as editors should determine the course of your poetry writing – after all, we have our own biases. As writers and artists ourselves, often we have learned that our work has been rejected by one journal only to be published by another. Every place is different, and you will find a home for your work, even if it’s not with us.