2022 ESSAY OPEN READING PERIOD
NOV 15, 2022 – JAN 15, 2023
The CSU Poetry Center welcomes submissions of book-length manuscripts in the essay genre during an open reading period this winter. Selected authors will receive publication in our Essay Series, a standard royalty contract, national promotion and distribution, and an invitation to read in Cleveland. This year, CSU Poetry Center editors will choose one or more books for publication.
ELIGIBILITY
1. All essay manuscripts are welcome—both collections and book-length works. We invite personal, lyric, and narrative essays, as well as graphic, hybrid, or visual works. For a sense of our aesthetic sensibility, please spend time with previous titles in the series. We are interested in work that falls under the umbrella of “creative nonfiction” and we do not publish scholarly or academic texts.
2. All submissions are welcome, regardless of an author’s previous publications; manuscripts should be approximately 100-300 pages in length. Translations are not eligible.
3. Intimate friends, relatives, or current and former students of our press’s editors are not eligible to submit. Faculty, staff, students, and alumni of Cleveland State University or the Northeast Ohio MFA Program (NEOMFA) are not eligible to submit.
GUIDELINES & NOTES
1. Make sure to record your name, manuscript title, address, phone number, and email address in your Submittable account; this is the information we will use to contact you. No other cover page or biographical information should be included in your submission and your name should not appear in the manuscript. You may include an acknowledgments page that lists previously published essays or excerpts.
2. Multiple submissions are welcome and simultaneous submissions are acceptable (please inform us immediately if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere).
3. The CSU Poetry Center reserves the right to consider all entrants for publication; a list of winners and finalists will be posted on the Poetry Center website in late spring/early summer of 2023.
TO SUBMIT
1. Upload your manuscript as a .docx or .pdf to Submittable (mail submissions are not eligible).
2. The essay open reading fee must be paid through Submittable. You may choose the amount you wish to contribute: $1, $12, or $28. Fees go to the press’s operational costs and publishing the selected book(s).
3. Email poetrycenter@csuohio.edu with any further questions.
* Please know that all manuscripts submitted to us are reviewed with great care and are read by our editors. We do not read manuscripts directly in Submittable’s software and do not use their labels to identify the status of a manuscript.
* As a token of our appreciation for your readership and support of small press literary publishing, authors who send a manuscript to the essay open reading period will receive a discount code for 25% off any single book from the CSUPC catalogue (active between 11/15/22 and 2/1/23).
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Previous titles in the series:
Telephone: Essays in Two Voices by Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade (2021), selected by Hanif Abdurraqib
Codependence by Amy Long (2019), selected by Brian Blanchfield
The Leftovers by Shaelyn Smith (2018), selected by Renee Gladman
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well by James Allen Hall (2017), selected by Chris Kraus
A Bestiary by Lily Hoang (2016), selected by Wayne Koestenbaum
