If you’re interested in having your poetry considered for the Catholic Poetry Room, please e-mail your submission to Jeffrey Essmann, editor, at jeffrey.essmann@gmail.com after reviewing the guidelines below.
Please include the following information in all submissions. All submissions should be in a Word document. It is okay to include multiple poem submissions in the same Word document. A Word template is available below.
- Your name
- Your website (if applicable)
- If the poem was previously published, where was it published?
- Title of the poem
- Body of the poem
- Short bio (not more than 200 words)
- If you are submitting an ekphrastic poem, please also include a photo of the image about which the poem is written. The image can either be pasted into the Word document or attached as a separate JPEG file. Please only submit images to which you have rights or which are in the public domain.
Please read other poems in the Catholic Poetry Room to get a feel for whether your poetry is a good fit.
Frequency: We publish approximately one poem each week (52 poems each year).
Audience: Primarily Catholics, many of whom are new to poetry. Typical of contemporary readers, many may not have read any poetry since high school. As you consider poems that might be appropriate for the site, consider them through the eyes of someone fairly new to poetry. It’s fine for a poem to be formally or thematically challenging, but it should always, ultimately, be accessible.
Guidelines: We accept up to five poems per submission, both new and previously-published poetry, and are looking for poems that show a strong connection between faith and everyday life, break open Scripture in a new way for the reader, or poems in which the religious content may be oblique but the poem itself is a sacramental.
We welcome a wide range of poetic forms, from formal and free verse to ekphrastics, and are looking in general for a sense of heightened language, effective imagery, and an honest expression of the author’s spiritual journey. We prefer work whose religious intent is carried more by imagery than sermonizing.
There’s no compensation for poetry published on the site. We will include a 200-word bio with a link to your website. If the poem was previously published, we will gladly include attribution of its initial publication.