Our submission window is open two months of the year, January and September. We are currently closed to submissions. 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 archival rights. 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. We also publish one or two essays in each 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.

For an additional fee, we offer an expedited response (within three weeks) to one submission per reading period; for regular submissions, our response time is within three months.

Tar River Poetry accepts work based on aesthetic merit; the editors read over two thousand poems per reading period and publish roughly 32 to 38 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.

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