So You Want To

Submit to Birdcoat

Here's What You Need To Know

Birdcoat Quarterly pays its writers and artists. We are currently able to pay $20 per poem and $25 per essay, and we hope to be able to raise that amount in the near future. If you'd like to help us reach that goal, you can donate here.

We welcome submissions that blur genre and play with form, experiment with compression or expansion, use language in surprising ways, and bring attention to subject matter of contemporary urgency or uncommon interest. We especially love work that is tender, weird, and wild, hard-hitting and incisive, clear-sighted and daring. Stun us, wound us, share your gifts, or keep us warm—send us work that is unapologetically yours. We will be open for submissions to our our Editors' Choice Prize in Poetry from September 1, 2024 - December 1, 2024 and our Editors' Choice Prize in Essays from March 1, 2025 - June 1, 2025.

We only accept submissions through Submittable, and you can access our submissions manager here. We are currently open for expedited submissions and art submissions. We will be open for standard poetry and essay submissions this quarter from October 15, 2024 to December 31, 2024. Our submission fee is a standard $3, approximately the cost of postage from the old-school days, and is used completely to run the journal and pay contributors.

We take submissions of up to five poems (or a maximum of ten pages) in a single document and lyric essays of up to 5,000 words. We only considered previously unpublished work and request First North American Serial Rights. All rights revert back to the author/artist upon publication.

We also accept submissions of visual art, in galleries of twelve, to be paired with the written work for each issue.

All accepted work is published in our online quarterly issues.

Information about submissions for our Editors' Choice Prizes can be found here.

We are now in our open reading period for our sister project Ghost Peach Press. Submissions for our sixth annual book contest will open on January 1, 2025. More information about the contest can be found under the Press tab.