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Submission Guidelines

General submissions are open.
Current reading period: February 15 – March 1

  • 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. Poems selected for publication in Frozen Sea may be submitted to Verse Daily.

  • Send 3 – 5 pieces through Submittable. 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 Submittable that tells us the titles of your poems/art and includes a short (~50 word) third-person bio.

  • Please attach all poetry included in your submission in 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.

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

  • Simultaneous submissions are accepted: please let us know, as soon as you can, if your work finds publication elsewhere by sending us a Message in Submittable (not the Notes feature — we won’t see those!)

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • If your work appears in Frozen Sea, please include Frozen Sea on an acknowledgments page when it appears in a collection — and let us know if you have a book coming out, so we can help spread the word! 💙

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

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