The Fall 2025 reading period opens September 1 and closes September 30. We will be reading for the Spring 2026 issue, published online.

Our submission window is open two months of the year, January and September. 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 document per reading period. We also publish one or two prose pieces about poetry per issue, each 1000-1500 words. Prose pieces are generally reviews or essays 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 circumstances. 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.

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