Best New Poets 2007 is now accepting nominations. See www.bestnewpoets.org to submit work to our Open Competition until our final deadline: midnight, June 15, 2007.

Best New Poets is an annual anthology of 50 poems by emerging writers, where we define “emerging” as a poet who has yet to publish a book-length collection. You can view our full eligibility rules at www.bestnewpoets.org/eligibility.html.

Please note: There is a reading fee of $8 for all Open Competition entries; the fee includes a reading of your work and a copy of the 2007 anthology mailed to the address you supply at time of entry.

If you submit work to Best New Poets, your poetry goes into an online database along with other Open Competition entrants and nominations from writing programs and literary magazines across North America. A pool of readers ranks the submissions blindly. We expect to send the top 175 picks to this year’s editor, Natasha Trethewey, by July 15. She selects her final 50 poems by July 30 … and we notify you soon after. Meanwhile, because we use an online database, you can track the status of your submission, making sure it has arrived and checking to see if we’ve evaluated it. We try to keep the selection process
as transparent as we reasonably can.

Thanks to a partnership with the University of Virginia Press, Best New Poets 2007 will be available in retail bookstores near you, as well as through online sites like amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, booksamillion.com, and others.

Sales of Best New Poets 2006 have been brisk and exceeded our projections, but you can still order remaining copies at the website. Upcoming Best New Poets readings are listed on our main web page, and there is also a blog and an FAQ page for many of the questions you might have.