Editor Interview: Frozen Sea

Axes for the frozen sea.

An incomplete list: & Change, Afternoon Visitor, Bear Review, Bennington Review, Couplet Poetry, DIAGRAM, fourteen poems, Ghost City Press, HAD, RHINO, Seaford Review, Seventh Wave, Sho Poetry Journal, Thirty West Publishing House, Whale Road Review

Another incomplete list: Ellen Bass, William Bronk, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Tim Dlugos, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Brenda Hillman, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, June Jordan, Timothy Liu, Heather McHugh, D.A. Powell, Carl Phillips, Sappho, sam sax

We like to keep up with our contributors and use our social media presence to highlight other publications or news from them. In addition to publishing on our website, we also cross-post work from contributors on our social media pages in order to have their work reach a wider audience.

Read through an issue or two to see what kind of work we’re drawn to. If there’s something that you especially appreciate about Frozen Sea, let us know in your cover letter—it’s great to hear genuine enthusiasm from submitters! We have a slight preference for shorter work (less than thirty lines, or so) and longer lines in a poem can be difficult for us to format for the website. Additionally, we like to see range in a submission: different tones, different structural choices, different subject matter.

We’ve been asked before what we’re looking for in poetry submissions—we really don’t know until we see it! In general, if we admire a poem to the point that we’re jealous we weren’t the ones to write it, we’ll want to publish it. Also, if we get a feeling that we would be disappointed to lose out on a poem because another journal publishes it first, that’s an indication we should accept it.

Sometimes we’ll get submissions that feel like the same packet is being sent to a ton of different journals without regard for what the journal has previously published. We’re more drawn to a submission if it’s clear that the submitter has read previous work we’ve published and has connected to it in some way.
Frozen Sea is not exclusively a queer journal — sometimes submitters think that we only publish queer contributors, but that’s not the case: while we do have a preference for spotlighting the work of queer writers, we only ask that contributors treat being published in a queer-affiliated journal with respect.

Short cover letters work fine. We have a cover letter template on our submission guidelines to give people a sense of what we’re looking for. A few previous publication credits are nice to know about, but we evaluate each submission based on what it contains.

Yup! We read it all. We try our best to send personalized rejections when we can to let people know if we especially liked a piece within the submission. Many of our contributors were previously rejected before they had work appear in Frozen Sea. A ‘no’ from us is not a ‘no’ forever!

We’re currently a two-person team, so we have to agree unanimously to accept a piece. Our tastes are pretty well-aligned, so it’s usually a smooth process to agree on what we should accept. We’ll send acceptances quickly if we’re excited by what we read, and we’re often reading submissions as they come in.

We both work busy, full-time jobs when we’re not doing editorial work for Frozen Sea! Reading submissions usually happens during whatever time we can make it happen, and it’s a joy to see what work comes through. We’ve felt a much stronger connection to the literary scene as a whole since we’ve started Frozen Sea, and it’s always great to discover new work we’re excited about.

Occasionally, we’ll suggest edits to a piece if we like it but there’s something about it that stops it from being an unreserved ‘yes’. We give all of our contributors a chance to see how their work will appear before it goes live, and they approve any final edits.

Yes! We nominate for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. We also submit our issues to Verse Daily.