Tupelo Quarterly

Poetry rejections

Standard

2025

Dear Poet,

We cannot thank you enough for submitting to the 2025 Summer Open Reading Period!

We deeply appreciate your interest in Tupelo Press. Unfortunately, your manuscript was not among the five we selected for publication, although many of your manuscripts had us (Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Levine, Publisher, and Cassandra Cleghorn, Poetry Editor) reading, re-reading, and discussing them many times over, and for days. In all, we received and personally read and considered approximately 1,400 manuscripts, so very many of them extraordinary.

Know then, that this is absolutely no reflection on the quality of your work. We want to be very clear that we found many manuscripts we would have been proud to publish, and more than a few of those are ones we part from with a palpable sense of loss.

You can read about the manuscripts and honorable mentions we selected here: https://tupelopress.org/past-winners/tupelo-press-proudly-announces-the-results-of-the-2025-summer-open-reading-period

When considering where next to send your manuscript, please keep in mind both the Helena Whitehill Award, which closes October 31st, and the Tupelo Press Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, which runs through December 31st: https://tupelopress.subfolios.com/submit

We hope that you'll keep your work in front of us! Virtually every manuscript we’ve ever published has been submitted to us more than once, and not a few have been submitted multiple times. Meanwhile, all of us here at Tupelo Press honor your devotion to the practice. Sincerely, Kristina Marie Darling, Cassandra Cleghorn & Jeffrey Levine

p.s. Please accept our sincerest apologies for this notification being a day late. As ever, we are deeply grateful for your interest in and support of Tupelo Press.

2020

Dear first-name,

Thank you for thinking of Tupelo Quarterly as a possible home for your work. While this particular submission doesn't meet our editorial needs, we appreciate the opportunity to consider it. We are grateful to you for trusting us with your work, and we wish you the best of luck placing it in another magazine.

Sincerely, The Editors Tupelo Quarterly