Poems

Our reading period will run from Aug. 1 - Oct. 1 each year, with the annual issue planned for April of the following year. 

Please read our Mission Statement while deciding upon poems to submit. See “Mission” under the “About Us” tab at the top our home page.

For a litany with more specific examples of the kinds of poems that we publish, please also read our page on this website from the editor’s interview with The Curious Catholic podcast, located under the “Events” tab at the top of our home page.

Poets are invited to submit up to 5 poems, each of which should be no more than 2 typed pages in length.  Poems must be unpublished, neither in print, nor on the web, nor self-published.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted.  However, in the meantime, should a poem be accepted for publication elsewhere, please notify us as soon as possible by leaving us a message in Submittable.

YOUR SINGLE WORD FILE should contain: a cover letter followed by the pages with all the poems you wish to submit.

YOUR COVER LETTER: should include a short biography, approximately 50-75 words in length and a brief explanation about why Presence is an appropriate venue for your work. 

YOUR BIOGRAPHY: should list at least your most recent book titles, some titles of journals containing individual poems, any key awards or honors received.  Other information individualizing the poet is also encouraged, such as occupation, geographical location, interests.  Poets may also wish to explain briefly how their poems are informed by Catholicism, either in their inception or content or otherwise, but this request is optional and at the discretion of the poem's author.  The poems themselves should stand alone without the need of gloss.  However, we also recognize the value of such autobiographical information for many readers.  We print short biographies of contributing poets in an appendix in each issue.

YOUR POEM PAGES: should include all the poems to be submitted.  Be sure that your name and e-mail address appear at the top of EVERY page in your file.  If possible, please submit poems in Garamond 11-point font. Take care that spacing is preserved and that you are sending your latest revised version of your poem(s). Please start each poem on a new page of the Word file.

Because of limited staff and the size of our submissions, we cannot guarantee individualized editorial responses to the poems submitted.  However, we will make every effort to notify poets of acceptance or rejection within 3-4 months after the close of the reading period.

Presence welcomes the work of established and emerging writers. Poets who have contributed to Presence include Marilyn Nelson, Julia Alvarez, Martha Collins, Robert Cording, Jim Daniels, Dana Gioia, Paul Mariani, Kate Daniels, John F. Deane, Daniel Tobin, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Martha Silano and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Translators who have contributed include Ilya Kaminsky, Garrett Hongo, Pablo Medina, Katherine M. Hedeen and Janet McAdams. Presence has interviewed Christian Wiman, Brian Doyle, John F. Deane, Mary Szybist, Rhina P. Espaillat and James Matthew Wilson, among others.

Prize nominations:

Presence nominates for the annual Pushcart Prize and sends copies of each issue to Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, New Pages and Poets House in NYC. We also nominate for Orison Books’ annual Best Spiritual Literature anthology.

For a complete list of our accolades to date, please see the following page on our website:

https://www.catholicpoetryjournal.com/accolades

Library periodical indexes:

Presence is now listed among the many publications on the MLA Directory of Periodicals, and some of our interviews and essays are in the process of being indexed in the MLA Bibliography. Our issues are also in the process of being made available through the EBSCO Information Systems databases.

Rights information:

We ask for first serial rights and anthology rights (for any future anthology of poems from a series of publication years of the journal). We may request, at the author’s discretion, the right to publish accepted poems electronically on our Web site and/or post them on our social media accounts. All other rights revert to the author upon publication, with the expectation that Presence will be credited when poems are republished. Acknowledgments should cite in the following manner: "Poem or prose title" was originally published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2017 [i.e. the appropriate year].