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Submission Guidelines

General submissions are closed.
Next reading period: February 15 – March 1

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines
will not be considered for Frozen Sea.

  • We are especially interested in publishing work from early-career/emerging poets (poets who have yet to publish a full-length collection, or have recently published a full-length collection). We also consider work from poets who have published multiple full-length collections—we want to lead readers to their next favorite poets.

  • We publish visual art too, acknowledging that poetry does not have to be confined to the written word.

  • We nominate for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize.

  • Send 3 – 5 pieces through email. We would love to read work that is your personal favorite and, for whatever reason, has not yet found publication. Include a brief and friendly cover letter in the body of your email that tells us the titles of your poems/art and includes a short (~50 word) third-person bio.

  • Please attach all poetry to your email included in one PDF—please do not send Word documents or Google Doc links. For visual art: attach a JPEG or similar file format.

  • It is challenging for us to preserve the original formatting of poems with long lines or lots of negative space. Any lines longer than 50 characters may get broken in an unfortunate way due to website formatting. We recommend sending shorter poems—think sonnet-y things. Poems over 30 lines or so often feel a tad long for us, our apologies, though we don’t have an excact line limit.

  • Simultaneous submissions are accepted: please let us know, as soon as you can, if your work finds publication elsewhere by sending us a quick note as a reply to your original submission email.

  • Frozen Sea has no reading fee. We do not offer payment at this time. We wish we could. We’re currently scheming ways to get funding.

  • We are a small team, although we aim to reply to submissions within 30 days. Feel free to send us a note if we’re taking entirely too long to respond; sometimes emails from us go to spam folders.

  • If we decline your submission, please wait until the next reading period to send work. Reading periods are open for two weeks after each issue is published. Multiple submissions sent within the same reading period will not be considered.

  • Each issue publishes on the 15th of the month. We'll publish four issues in 2025: Issue Seven on February 15, Issue Eight on April 15, Issue Nine on August 15, and Issue Ten on October 15.

  • We want to be the first platform to publish your work—please don’t send previously published work.

  • If we select your work for publication, Frozen Sea will retain worldwide First Serial Rights and worldwide First Electronic Rights. (Meaning: once your work is published in Frozen Sea, the copyright immediately reverts to you.) We also reserve the right to keep your work on our website in perpetuity, and to promote it on social media channels including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Bluesky.

  • If your work appears in Frozen Sea, please give us a shout-out when it appears in a collection! 💙

  • Please make sure your subject line is “Frozen Sea Submission” otherwise it will miss our mail filter and may be automatically discarded.

  • You can visit this link if you’d like a cover letter template.

  • Please be nice to us; we will be nice to you.

Frozen Sea is based in Santa Cruz, CA
ISSN 2995-6293
🌊 🧊 🪓