Submission Guidelines

For Poetry

  • Jarfly is open for poetry submissions.
  • Please send 3-5 original, unpublished poems, to jarflysubmissions@gmail.com. 
  • All poems should be compiled into a single document with a page break between each poem. Files should be formatted as .DOCX or PDF files (PDF especially if your poem requires special formatting), and should not exceed a maximum of 8 pages. Please use a standard font like Times New Roman, Arial, or Garamond.​
 Picture
photo by Justyn Miller     

For Essays, Reviews, and Other Prose

  • Jarfly is presently open for essay submissions.
  • ​Please send 1 original review, essay, interview, or other poetry-related prose piece to  jarflysubmissions@gmail.com. 
  • For reviews, craft essays, pedagogy discussions, and related articles, please limit documents to a word count between 500 and 800 words (longer works may be accepted upon inquiry). Jarfly only reads and publishes book reviews for poetry (both full-length collections and chapbooks). Reviews should focus primarily on the book in question, and should demonstrate a close reading of the text. If the review references secondary sources, please include a brief, informal works cited page.
  • Jarfly's review philosophy is that reviews are an avenue for writers to give back to the literary and poetry communities. While we like reviews that are critical and rigorous, we are not looking for take-downs, mean-spirited, or overwhelmingly negative commentaries. We think that unpleasant, vindictive reviews don't benefit anyone and if you send us one, chances are that we won't publish it.
  • It is worth noting that we are eager to read and publish pedagogy and resources for teachers. If you have lesson/unit plans, activities, discussion points, or other resources, that revolve around poetry for grades K-12 or for university undergraduates, Jarfly is excited to share these resources and spread a love for poetry to student communities that are altogether too often jaded to it.
  • If you have any other questions about what prose we're looking for, or if you have a piece that you aren't sure if we would publish, please use our contact form to inquire. We'll respond as soon as possible!

For Artwork

  • Jarfly is presently open for art submissions.
  • Please send 3-5 high-resolution (300 dpi is ideal) scans/photographs/artworks to jarflysubmissions@gmail.com. 
  • We're open for many things, but mainly, we're looking for thoughtful, compelling artwork with a message.
  • As far as photography goes, we tend to avoid nature shots (unless it questions or explores broader social ideas), family photography (unless it's photojournalism), and abstract experimentation (e.g. long-exposure, blurry images). We like photography that speaks to regional life, that explores how people relate with one another, that interprets and reinterprets, that causes us to rethink and question ourselves and the world around us.
  • We enjoy illustration and concept design, and we consider these genres just as worth of the "art" category as painting, sculpture, and other media.
  • We don't publish fan-art, figure studies, voyeuristic artwork, or artwork depicting graphic violence, nudity, or sexual content. Our magazine is geared towards general audiences, including secondary schools. If you have content questions, consider whether or not the work could be shown in a public high school and let that guide you. If you have more specific questions, feel free to use our contact form to inquire. ​

GENERAL NOTES

  • We encourage anyone who is considering submitting work to Jarfly to read through some of the work we have previously published or take a look over the poets we've included in the past. All of our issues are free and online, and they always will be.
  • We value, welcome, and encourage submissions from marginalized writers. We will not consider work with racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic themes, and neither will we consider work that contains explicit sexual references or graphic, gratuitous violence. 
  • We recognize our position as a platform of speech, and we recognize how publication gives individuals an amplified voice. That said, we believe that curating a publication is a responsibility, and we work to avoid publishing work by people who we feel violate the ethics of Jarfly Magazine. We are not interested in publishing writing by individuals who harass, abuse, or otherwise victimize anyone. If we, as a community, consider plagiarism - the theft of written or intellectual material - as a crime worth punishing with exclusion from publishing spaces, then we should certainly consider sexual abuse and other forms of harassment and violence as offenses worthy of at least the same response. While we try our best not to publish abusers and harassers, we recognize that sometimes we might miss something. As such, we reserve the right to retroactively deny publication and remove work from our site without warning if and when we are made aware of an incident of this nature.
  • ​We do accept simultaneous submissions, but do note in your cover letter that they have been submitted elsewhere. Do let us know immediately if a poem is accepted elsewhere. 
  • You are welcome to submit in multiple genres. If you do, please send separate submissions for each genre, and submit no more than once per genre until you receive a decision back on your previous submission in that genre.
  • We ask that previously published contributors wait as least one issue before submitting again (unless submitting in a separate genre). This allows for a broader variety of voices in Jarfly, and allows contributors inclusion in Jarfly ​about once a year.
  •  Jarfly does maintain First North American Serial Rights, and the right to archive your work online indefinitely. Upon publication, all other rights return to you. If your poem is later accepted elsewhere, please note that it first appeared in Jarfly.
  • Regrettably, we cannot pay contributors at this time, but we are hope we be able to eventually.​​

WHAT WE LIKE IN OUR POEMS

​We understand that sometimes its helpful to have some specific guidelines when choosing poems to submit to a magazine. Below, we have included some of the magazine staff's personal preferences to help you get an idea about what we might be looking for. Hopefully this will help!

We love poems about people, our connection and disconnection, our strength and vulnerability, our absolutes and nuances. We believe poetry has the power to discover, connect, and share, and poems that work toward these goals make us happy. We want poems about family, their joyous and complicated relationships, and how people change us. What is individual and special about your experience? What is universal? What is thoughtful? What will linger after the poem is read?

Poems with a present poetic "I" speak to us, especially when these poems share experiences, feelings, dreams, and insecurities. We want poems alive with joy, with pain, and with honesty. We want poems that root inside and reach for what is real. We want poems that struggle and doubt, that hunger and dream, that celebrate their living and bury their dead. We want poems that explore, discover, and realize. Poems that aren't safe, but good.

We look for poems that are clear, and don't need multiple passes for a reader to find joy and understanding, but we do look for poems that reveal something new with each new visit. We believe in the living motion of language and poems, in their transformation and timelessness. We value clarity, but not at the expense of the mysterious, not with the loss of the unexpected, not with the sacrifice of exploration. Some things aren't clear, but we are thrilled in the mess of figuring them out. 

We value concision and believe in the economy of language. We admire poems that choose each word carefully, bravely, and purposefully. Poems do not have to be very long to have a very significant impact. Chances are if a poem is longer than a page, we will not publish it. This is not to say that you should not necessarily send a long poem - but if you do, it needs to deserve its length. The same is true of very short poems - concision should not come at the cost of clarity.
Photography courtesy of Justyn M. Miller