Submission Guidelines

Submit 4-6 poems, totaling no more than ten pages, with your enrollment form. Please note that while we invoke public school tropes for the identity of this journal, we are not asking for school-specific poems or student-specific submitters. 

Submissions for our Spring 2026 issue will open on October 15 and close on December 1. Notifications will be sent in January. We only have room to publish a handful of writers, and we need to accept a minimum of three poems. If your pieces aren’t selected, please know we still read them with care and are cheering you on from the bleachers.

Poets selected will be published under the condition that they write a five-paragraph essay (300-600 words) on a fellow contributor’s poem packet for the issue. Contributors are randomly and anonymously assigned their poem packet by the Public School Poetry Vice-Principals shortly after being accepted to the issue. We ask that these "five-paragraph essays" foreground their assigned packet so readers can use them to enhance their own reading of the poems. We encourage contributors to consider the “five-paragraph essay” as a structure to play with/use in much the same way you might approach a sonnet or an ekphrasis. Essays can be as lyrical or analytical as you like as long as there’s five parts/units/paragraphs. Contributors are not obligated to address every poem, and we won’t edit your essay or ask for revisions as long as what’s written foregrounds the poems and follows our school spirit guidelines below:

School Spirit Guidelines

We are here to lift each other up, not put each other in trash cans

We love questions and paradoxes, and we value insight over criticism

We are generous to styles, subjects, tones, forms, and aesthetics that differ from our own