In the Spirit of Poetry Has Value | September 2016 Report

L’shana tova, everyone! May your New Year be filled with joyous literary journeys and sweet acceptances.

September proved to be a banner month for sending out my work and for exploring new poetic styles.

Here are my September statistics:

Poetry: At the recommendation of poet Matthew Lippman, I began to follow the blog of Trish Hopkinson. She wrote about a call for poems that started with “If I” for Silver Birch Press. I took a poem I had that asked “What If?” and modified it. I submitted and received an acceptance within the hour. Silver Birch Press posted the poem on October 1, 2016. In September I submitted to 16 journals (Baltimore Review, Agni, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Redivider, Stillwater Review, Green Mountains Review, Silver Birch Press, Lascaux Review, Third Coast,  Phoebe, A Public Space, Rust + Moth, Third Wednesday, Hermeneutic Chaos, and Harpur Palate) and received two acceptances (Silver Birch Press and Rose Red Review) and two rejections (The Common and New England Review).

Academic journal articles: “No Stone Unturned: Newark’s Grove Street Cemetery” is undergoing peer review by New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. My Northeast Modern Language Association proposal was accepted for the roundtable on Literature and the First-year Experience at the March 2017 conference.

Looking ahead, I’m curious to see how a modified submission strategy by the numbers might increase acceptances. Stay tuned!

Question 4U: How is your writing going? Have you determined any specific submission strategies?