Our submission window is open two months of the year, January and September. The Fall 2026 reading period for the Spring 2027 issue opens September 1 and closes September 30.

Tar River Poetry acquires first electronic and non-exclusive electronic archival rights. Print rights revert to the author upon publication. If your work is reprinted in the future, please credit Tar River Poetry as the first publisher.

You can submit up to 5 poems in a single MS Word document (only) per reading period. As we are now free to read online, the $3 reading fee per submission funds the journal. For an additional fee, we offer an expedited response (within three weeks) to one submission per reading period; our response time for regular submissions is usually within three months.

We also publish one or two essays per issue, around 1000 words. These are generally on the craft of poetry. Please query the prose editor, Matthew Buckley Smith, at tarriverprose@gmail.com

Tar River Poetry does not accept work that has been written by or with AI, under any circumstance. Please respect this policy; keep poetry human.

Tar River Poetry publishes around 36 poems per issue, almost all of which come to us through our Submittable page. We kindly ask that if you’ve been published in Tar River Poetry to wait one year (two reading periods) before submitting new work to the journal. We also ask that if you have submitted work that has been rejected by the journal not to resubmit a revision of the same work in the next reading period unless we’ve asked you to do so.

Please submit via our Submittable link below. We look forward to reading your work!