June Road Press

Winter 2025–26 Open Reading Period: Anthology Edition

June Road Press is open for submissions from December 2, 2025, to March 15, 2026 (now extended from February 1!), and this cycle, instead of full-length manuscript submissions, we’re looking for individual poems for inclusion in our first anthology, with a projected publication date of late 2026.

This one-of-a-kind compilation of place-based poems—be that place a region or city or town, a river or lake or coastline, a landscape, an intersection, a grounded memory, a house, a room, a bedside, a tree, a sense of home, a moment in time—will bring together resonant voices from across the country in an exploration of rootedness and movement, loosely framed as a cross-country American road trip. Think of it as a mixtape meets a photo album meets a field guide, made of poetry.

As with our full-length collections, the emphasis will be on the work of women and emerging writers, but this will be a transitional volume for the press and is open to anyone. We’re looking for poems that have presence, that go beyond description to engage with place and time in a way that moves us and will contribute to the range and interconnectedness of the larger whole as this project takes shape.

Guidelines and preferences to note:

• Simultaneous submissions are fine; we want great writing to find a home elsewhere if it can’t be with us.

• Please only submit once for consideration in this reading period—but your submission may include up to three poems (from which we’ll select one, if accepted; if we love your work but don’t see a poem in your submission that’s quite the right fit, we might get in touch to ask for more).

• To balance production considerations and the number of contributors we can include, we’re looking for poems that will fit on one to two typeset pages.

• Submitted poems should be previously unpublished in a book (publication in a literary magazine or journal, online, or in a chapbook is fine as long as you retain the copyright); the work should not require permission to reprint.

• Your submission should be in English, original, singly authored, and in no part AI-generated.

• Due to distribution and resource constraints and the framework of this project, we’re currently limiting submissions to U.S. residents.

• We’re aiming to publish primarily debut or emerging writers in this volume, loosely defined as those with no more than two published books.

• We invite you to include a condensed author bio with your submission of under 100 words. A brief author note will appear in the anthology for each contributor, aimed at lightly grounding the piece and helping an interested reader find more of your writing, and while this can be added later in the process, we’d welcome a draft along with your submission. The best place to put this is in the bio field during the submission steps, but it's also fine to include it in your file of poems.

To submit, please upload your submission as a single Word or PDF file that includes up to three poems for consideration. NOTE: The platform settings will ask for three pieces, which might make this confusing, but you'll then be prompted to upload a single file with your combined poems. (Don't worry about the piece titles you're asked to enter or what to call your file, as any label will do; rest assured that everything will be attached to your submission in your name on our end. Likewise, your file itself can include identifying information or not and can be formatted any way you like—all we need is the text of your poems to consider.) In the cover letter field, feel free to provide, informally, any further context or notes about yourself, your writing, and/or a connection to the project or the press that you'd like to share. If you hit a major snag while trying to submit, email [email protected] and we'll help manually as soon as we can.

We plan to respond to all submissions as quickly as possible after the reading period closes in mid-March, with some decisions likely coming sooner, particularly if you’ve submitted earlier in the process. While the number of submissions isn’t capped, we’ll be able to include at most 100 contributors in the volume, so decisions will become more selective depending on the total number and nature of the submissions we receive.

Accepted contributors will receive, at minimum, personal editorial feedback, the opportunity to review a proof, and a complimentary copy of the print book upon publication. We also plan to make an audiobook edition of the anthology, and we’ll be inviting contributors to record their poem for inclusion (and all contributors will receive a copy of the finished audiobook).

Lastly, for those who might be in the process of compiling or shopping around a full-length manuscript, this serves as an opportunity to introduce your work to the press editor, who will be making note of standout emerging poets to consider for our future titles during and potentially outside of the next reading period (and if you’ve previously submitted to one of our reading periods and were a finalist or received personal feedback, we’ll be especially eager to read your work for this project).

Not Open