The Orchards is open! NYC poets remote reading!
Introduction
Kelsay Books' own literary journal, The Orchards, is currently accepting submissions for our Summer 2025 issue! View the guidelines here. Here's a word cloud to suggest a bittersweet, sunnydark theme...
Summer Gothic | Barefoot in the Grass | Sonnets & Shape Poems | Float Trip | Confession in the Throat | Watercolors, Sunflowers | Impossible Desires | Fever Dream | Golden Shovel | Bittersweet | New Myths | Cul-de-Sac | Retro TVs | Funnel Cake | Sunday Morning Reverie | Projecting Emotions onto Something/Someone Else | Mother Taking Sleeping Pills | Peach Preserves | Apple Pie | Scraped Knees | Grieving Badly | The Golden Age of the Shopping Mall | Opposing Views of the Same Thing | Robin’s Egg Blue | One in Love; the Other, Not | Amicable Ghosts | Stranger Is Not Quite Right | Illusions in the Desert | Maps | “How to . . .” | First Crush | Uncomfortable Discoveries | Every Family, a Cult | The Sandman | Unlikeable Protagonist | Cotard’s Syndrome | Vintage Cars | Tragic Misunderstanding | Hush Hush | Bad Omens | Prize in the Box
Read until the end for more opportunities for poets!
Events
New York:
To bring regional poets together from the comfort of home, we're hosting our annual NYC reading remotely! Mark May 17th at 12:00 p.m. MT on your calendar. Click here or on the image to register. Please register with the same email address used on your Zoom account.
Correction: Sarah Sarai will feature as an esteemed guest reader. 
Sunday, April 27, 2025 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Suite Bar NYC
992 Amsterdam Avenue
Corner W 109th St
212-222-4600
Introduced by Linda Stern
Co-hosts: John Foy, David M. Katz & Linda Stern
Special thanks to Chander Malik and Ivan Balachandran at Suite and to Cordis Heard
No cover charge, good company, great poetry.
Wendy Sloan practiced labor-side labor law with her firm, Hall & Sloan, before returning to poetry. Her poems, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in the Alabama Literary Review, Blue Unicorn, Light, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Orbis, Pratik, Shadowplay, and Think, and in the anthologies The Able Muse Translation Issue, The Best of the Raintown Review, The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, and Poems for a Liminal Age (benefitting Medecins Sans Frontieres, UK), among other publications. Her collection is Sunday Mornings at the Caffe Mediterraneum (Kelsay Books, 2016). Sloan was a finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Competition, several of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and last summer her translation of Gaspara Stampa’s Sonnet 208 received a Readers’ Choice Award from Orbis. Amicizia, Sloan’s collaborative work with artist Holly Brigham, was launched last March at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. It is an imagined friendship book of Baroque Italian artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Giovanna Garzoni. Sloan hosts the Carmine Street Metrics poetry reading series in New York together with Terese Coe and Anton Yakovlev.
Elizabeth Morse, author of Unreasonable Weather, has several spring appearances scheduled:
Georgia:
The 15th annual Red Clay Writers Conference is on Saturday, April 26th, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Wilson Student Center on the Kennesaw State University Marietta Campus. Get your tickets here!
Massachusetts:
The 20th Newburyport Literary Festival is in beautiful downtown Newburyport and online April 25–27!
Whether your interest is in fiction or nonfiction, poetry or history, or a little bit of everything, there’s a session for you. Take a look at the schedule and start planning your time with us. Join us for our opening ceremony at the Firehouse on Friday at 6 p.m., followed by a full day of in-person programming at venues throughout downtown. Our Saturday evening event at 7 p.m at the Firehouse celebrates this year’s theme, The Importance of Being a Reader, and the festival continues with Zoom programming all day Sunday.
Pennsylvania:
Ann E. Michael will give a virtual reading hosted by One Art Journal on Sunday, May 4 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time. Register with your Zoom account here!
Awards
Congratulations Marie Rickmeyer! On The Verge earned the Literary Titan Book Award.
Congratulations Laura Rodley! Ribbons & Moths earned first place in the The BookFest's Nonfiction: Outdoors category and second place in the Artistic and Technical: Book Cover: Photography category.
Congratulations, Jennifer Horne! Letters to Little Rock earned the Hall-Waters Prize, given by Troy University (in Troy, Alabama) for excellence in southern writing.
Congratulations, Susan Vespoli! Therefore, Illuminated featured on Mom Egg Review's April Bookshelf.
Opportunities
You can learn more about each prize below:
- 2025 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize: awarded to the most outstanding poetry collection published in the U.S. in 2024
- 2025 James Laughlin Award: given to recognize and support a poet’s second book, slated for publication in the U.S. in 2026
Highland Park Poetry is accepting submissions for our 2025 Summer Muses’ Gallery Anthology on a Message in a Bottle.
Mom Egg Review is open until July 15, 2025 for literary submissions to our annual print issue on the theme of Mother and Family. All submissions are through Submittable.
We publish poetry (up to 3 poems, no more than 5 pages), and fiction, creative prose/nonfiction, and hybrid works (up to 1000 words) on mothering or motherhood. We also seek mother-themed art. You need not be a mother to submit. Our calendar conforms to Eastern Time.
The theme of this issue will be “Mother and Family.”
Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around us. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. For MER 24, we are exploring poems that address our role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider with and untangle these familial threads that can heal or hinder. Send us your poems, your family recipes, your generational myths, your memories that you’ve borne, your visions for the future.
Early Bird (free) submissions 4/23-5/1, or until we reach our Submittable limit.
Regular Submissions ($3 fee or free with subscription purchase) 4/24-7/15.
We will respond by November 2025. The issue will be published in April 2026.