Editor Interviews
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Read all the editors' answers to Duotrope's interview question: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you? Learn more.
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Here is a small sampling from our recent Editor Interviews. We have interviewed over 2,300 editors.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: Nothing matters to us. You can have loads of publication credits, or zero. We just want work that evokes emotion.
A: Name, address, location
A: Don't care at all.
A: We request a third-person bio for our website, but rest assured—our selection process remains unbiased. Every submission is judged solely on its merit, independent of the author's background.
A: Clearly, if a cover letter is filled with grammatical errors that is going to set off alarm bells, and possibly the shorter the better. Ideally, I just want to see the piece you’ve written and decide. It’s interesting to see where a writer might have been published before but previous publication credits do not matter to me. I love discovering undiscovered writers, be they eighteen or eighty.
A: No cover letters. If we like it we will zoom and see if our rapport is good.
Previous publication credits are a plus
A: Credentials matter. Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I don't care about cover letters or publication credits, so long as the work fulfills our vision and engages minds and hearts. In fact, my co-editor does not see any of the poets' names or bios until after publication.
A: Yes, we ask for a short bio and are thrilled when writers list previous publications
A: Where they live, and where they found us...
A: 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.
A: We like to forge a personal connection and relationship. A long cover letter is not required, but we are curious about who you are and why you love prose poetry.