STONE TELLING is looking for literary speculative poems with a strong emotional core. We focus on fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, and slipstream, but would consider outstanding science poetry and non-speculative poetry that fits the flavor of the magazine. Please note that we are not a mainstream literary poetry market, and non-speculative poetry will be an extremely hard sell.
While we are open to all speculative poetry, we are especially interested in seeing work that is multi-cultural and boundary-crossing, work that deals with othering and Others, work that considers race, gender, sexuality, identity, and disability issues in nontrivial and evocative ways. We’d love to see multilingual poetry, though that can sometimes be tricky. Try us!
There are no style limitations, but rhymed poetry will be a hard sell. Please try us with visual poetry, prose poetry, and other genre-bending forms. We will consider experimental poetry, but please remember that not all experimental poems are easy to represent in an e-zine format.
UPCOMING READING PERIODS :
- September 23 - November 27: Issue 6 (Science and Science Fiction)
- December 25 - February 20: Issue 7 (queer-themed)
SUMBISSION PARTICULARS:
- Length: We will consider poems of any length, but very short poetry (under 10 lines) and very long poetry (over 200 lines) will be a hard sell.
- You can submit up to THREE poems per submission.
- We prefer to receive poetry in the body of the email, but if your poem has non-standard formatting, you can send an attachment in .doc, .docx or .rtf format.
- Please put SUBMISSION: Author's name in the subject line.
- Please supply a short cover letter with your submission. List your latest credits, if applicable - if you are unpublished, that's fine too.
- Stone Telling does not accept simultaneous submissions.
- Response time is within 60 days. Please do not query before 60 days have passed. However, if you have not heard from us after 60 days, please query immediately.
- Editorial address is poetry at stonetelling dot com
REPRINTS: We are NOT looking for unsolicited reprints, but if you have a reprint that you feel is especially appropriate for publication at Stone Telling, please query.
RIGHTS: If accepted, you will be granting Stone Telling first North American serial, promotional, non-exclusive anthology, and archival rights. Copyright will revert to the author upon publication. If the piece is subsequently published in another venue, we ask that you source Stone Telling as first publication.
PAYMENT: $5(US) per unsolicited poem, upon publication. Payment by Paypal or check.
A Masquerade in Four Voices, Alexandra Seidel
The Changeling's Lament, Shira Lipkin
Terrunform, Tori Truslow The queer issue is here because we want to see more queer poetry. Since the inception of ST, we've published some amazing queer poems, but we keep taking about queer poetry because a) it matters to us, b) it's cool, c) there's not enough of it. What is "enough"? Well, when I was putting together the Moment of Change, for example, I had to look really, really hard for queer poems. I asked editors, who pointed me at some poems with G and L identities, some of which I reprinted, but I never felt like there was a whole lot of it. Bi, trans*, genderqueer and genderfluid poems proved really, really elusive. Lately, people have been sending excellent LGBTQ stuff to us because we are a queer-friendly market and we constantly talk about it, and we publish it, but now we want more, we want to put together a whole issue of it. We want to see your LGBTQ stuff. In fact, for this issue, we will consider any treatment of sexuality and gender that does not fall under the heteronormative paradigm. When in doubt, please just send it along. (also when in doubt, please comment and ask!) We want poetry in any speculative genre. If you have a literary (nonspec) poem that you feel will fit the magazine, please just send it along. In case you wondered: we are not interested in homophobic poetry. Yes, it is nominally about queer issues, but we are not interested. This should go without saying, but people *have* sent us such material in the past. Please desist. You do not have to identify as queer, in a queer relationship, or out of the closet, to write or read queer poetry.