Our next submission opportunity will be the 2025 Open Reading Period, which will be open February 1 – March 1. We offer two yearly opportunities for publication —our Open Reading Period each winter, and Other Futures Award each summer. Please see our Submittable for submission guidelines!
Subscribe to our email list for more info about upcoming submission opportunities.
Open Reading Period
Futurepoem welcomes unpublished, full-length manuscripts of poetry, prose, and multi-genre writing that challenge and expand on the potential for poetic form, language, content, and process. Work by underrepresented and emerging writers is especially welcome. Each year, we invite a rotating panel of distinguished guest editors to read and select new books for publication. The 2025 Open Reading Period will be open February 1 – March 1. The 2024 Open Reading Period is complete — this year's selections were Goodbye to a Dream Believed! by Joss Barton & In Order to Extract the Memory It Is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room by Susana Plotts Pineda.
2024 OPEN READING PERIOD SELECTIONS
Goodbye to a Dream Believed!
by Joss Barton
In Order to Extract the Memory It Is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room
by Susana Plotts Pineda
Selected by guest editors charles theonia, Uljana Wolf, and Elisa Biagini.
Author information below:
Joss Barton is a writer, journalist, and spoken word performance artist exploring and documenting queer and trans* life, love, and liberation. Her work blends femme-fever dreams over the soundtrack of the American nightmare. Combining prose poetry, non-fiction confessional essays, drag artistry, and spoken word stage performances, Joss examines the myriad states of queer trans womanhoods from historical, political, and pop cultural identities of death, desires, dreams, and disco.
Susana Plotts-Pineda is an artist and poet. Her writing has appeared in Works & Days, Lana Turner, The Brooklyn Rail, The Acentos Review, Kitchen Magazine, and Global Performance Studies. She has completed residencies at Beam Center's The Lighthouse on Governors Island and Brooklyn Arts Exchange's EmergeNYC. She is currently a fellow at the Library of America.
PAST OPEN READING PERIOD SELECTIONS
2023 Open Reading Period — Selected by guest editors Gabriela Jáuregui, Shiv Kotecha, and Ronaldo V. Wilson
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The Downsides by Ngozi "N/A" Oparah
Ngozi “N/A” Oparah is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer, researcher, and artist. Her other work has appeared in Fictional International, Madwomen in the Attic, Five:2 One, ANMLY, A Velvet Giant (Best of the Net Nomination), Foglifter (where she is currently prose editor), and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain; Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala, and HANGAR in Lisbon, Portugal. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a BS in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA where she teaches short form memoir and visual storytelling. She is currently studying towards a PhD in Creative Arts and Design that examines the roles of phenomenological, multidisciplinary narratives in improving mental health literacy. She has recently accepted an appointment as a lecturer in Creative Health at UCL. Her novella, Thick Skin, was published by KERNPUNKT Press and recognized by Lambda Literary and Big Other as one of April’s most anticipated books. She designs and facilitates creative writing and art workshops around the world. Find out more at naoparah.com.
Slow Mania by Nazareth Hassan
Nazareth Hassan is an interdisciplinary writer, director, musician, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Recent performances include #2112 at Center for Performance Research, Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and Untitled (1-5) at The Shed. Recent collaborators include Malcolm-X Betts, z tye, Tina Satter, Agnes Borinsky, and Alex Romania. Their performance score Untitled (1-5) was published by 3 Hole Press in 2022. They are a 2023-25 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
2022 Open Reading Period — Selected by guest editors Kay Gabriel, Renee Gladman, and Seth Price
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Not a Force of Nature by Amy De'Ath
Amy De'Ath teaches contemporary literature, culture, and theory at King's College London. Her critical book, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction, proposes a new way of reading poetry based on Marx's critique of value. She is the author of several short poetry books, including Lower Parallel (Barque Press, London), and ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition (Capricious, NY), and with Fred Wah, editor of a poetics anthology, Towards. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press). Not a Force of Nature is her first full-length collection.
Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) by Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough
Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough (b. 1991, richmond, va, usa). Poet. His books include The Western (1080 Press, 2023) and Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) (Futurepoem, 2024). He stays in Brooklyn, NY.
Other recent selections:
A Reaction to Someone Coming In by Wendy Lotterman
u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// by Stephon Lawrence
Nerve Curriculum by Manuel Paul López
The Autobiography of a Language: Essays and Stories by Mirene Arsanios
Making Water by Laura Jaramillo
Transverse by Lindsay Choi
Wild Peach S*an by D. Henry-Smith
The Nancy Reagan Collection by Maxe Crandall
Near, At by Jennifer Soong
Other Futures Award
The Other Futures Award is given annually to an innovative, adventurous full-length work that challenges conventions of genre and language, content and form. We are interested in writing that imagines new lived or literary possibilities, and questions established paradigms. The 2024 Other Futures Award is open for submissions July 15 – August 15. Visit our Submittable page for more information & to submit.
The selected manuscript will receive publication with Futurepoem, an honorarium of $1000, a standard royalty contract, and 25 author copies.
Subscribe to our email list for more info about upcoming submission opportunities, or visit our Submittable page.
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We are so excited to announce the winner of the 2023 Other Futures Award: Isabel Sobral Campos for her book The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation.
Isabel Sobral Campos has published two full-length poetry manuscripts, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as the Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poems also have been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil). Her translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON is forthcoming in May 2024 with Ugly Duckling Presse. With her sister, she is a co-founder and editor of Sputnik & Fizzle press. She teaches at Northeastern University and lives in Cambridge, MA.
The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation is a book-length poem reflecting on the fraught colonial history of Portugal through a memoirist lens.
Past Selections
Selected to receive the 2022 Other Futures Award
(jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk
makalani bandele
makalani bandele is author the poetry collections hellfightin’ (Willow Books, 2011), winner of the Integral Music Book Award, under the aegis of a winged mind (Autumn House Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. bandele’s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literary journals. His most recent poems, visual art, and essays can be found in or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Ocean State Review, Atticus Review, Poetry Northwest, theHythe, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a- Day. makalani is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem alum.
(jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a conceptual literary enterprise that imagines and recontextualizes for readers the Free Jazz performance of the fictional band jopappy & the sentence-makers. The poems and visual art in this book investigate anti-blackness, Western hegemonies, and the resilience and transcendence of Black culture. All the poems in this collection were written in a poetic form bandele invented called ‘the unit’, inspired by virtuoso pianist and composer Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures. The free jazz ethos and how it encourages polyvocality and a panoply of cultural and rhetorical references in a nonlinear, discordant, hermeneutically open modality make the unit arguably the first, self-consciously post-structuralist poetic form.
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Selected to receive the 2021 Other Futures Award
In Lieu of Solutions
Violet Spurlock
Violet Spurlock is a writer living in the Bay Area. Her published works include Alloyed Bliss (Eyelet, 2021) and VS VS VS (Gauss PDF, 2021). In addition to writing poetry, she also facilitates a writing group for trans authors and is currently at work on a novel. In Lieu of Solutions is her first full-length book.
In Lieu of Solutions whirls in the vertigo of gender transition and cascades into a questioning of intimacy, identity, and hope, asking poetry for what it cannot give in order to study what it offers instead.
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Selected to receive the 2020 Other Futures Award
Flag
Imani Elizabeth Jackson
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is from Chicago. Her writings appear in and are forthcoming from Triple Canopy, Apogee, BOMB, Triquarterly, and elsewhere. She collaborates with S*an D. Henry-Smith as mouthfeel; their book Consider the Tongue engages histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. Imani is also a member of the Poetry Project’s 2019-2020 newsletter editorial collective and co-organizes the Chicago Art Book Fair. She lives in Providence now, where she's an MFA candidate at Brown.
Systems of domination seek to straighten land, to straighten people, to overdetermine place. In Flag, the poet imagines a river as these systems’ ruin; a river’s mouth deforming their lines and forming them anew.
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Selected to receive the 2019 Other Futures Award
Planet Drill
Jessica Laser
Jessica Laser grew up in Chicago. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and the chapbooks He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press, 2016) and Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (Catenary Press, 2015). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley. Planet Drill will be published in 2021.
Planet Drill pierces through language, using natural slippages between words—from line to lie—to reach the central myths of speech and selfhood. Does what we say make us who we are? By what authority? Insistent on uses for language beyond the descriptive, these poems let go of the narrative of the present in order to provide access to simultaneous, conflicting truths. The driving force behind Planet Drill is a belief in poetry’s unique ability to follow the ambiguities inherent in language toward a latent, revelatory clarity—one we might reach if only we stopped straining to be clear.