Submit your poems!
WE THE SOIL is seeking poetry that was nurtured in creative community—whether it was written in a workshop with a dear teacher, edited (in a transformative way) by a poet-friend, or inspired by the work of a poet you admire.
With this online literary magazine, we hope to document a web of connections & gratitude among writers as a way of honoring the role of community in our creative lives.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit one poem in a PDF by September 21, 2025—or until 50 responses have been submitted.
All submissions are free via this form. *This form will be closed once we receive 50 submissions.
Submit one poem in PDF or DOC file. In order to help with organization on our end, please title the document as your initial/s - the title of your poem. For example: YR - The Poem Wants More
In your Cover Letter, please tell us about yourself, your work, and the role of community in your creative life along with a brief bio. Beginning with "Dear Editors,..." is perfectly fine with us.
For your submission, be prepared to write a brief explanation of how this poem was seeded or grown in community. If your poem is selected, we will include this as a brief “Community Note” that explains how a person, group of people, or organization helped nurture this specific poem. You can also think of it as a public thank you note for the person/people who supported or influenced your work.
We welcome simultaneous submissions. *Please email us at wethesoil.submissions@gmail.com to let us know as soon as your work is accepted elsewhere. This is also where you can direct any questions related to your submission.
We want to highlight new/recent writing, so we will not be publishing work that has already been published/curate in a literary magazine. We do accept work that has been shared on social media, in a newsletter or personal blog, in a reading, etc.
If your work is chosen for publication, you will be invited into an engaged editorial process that will involve receiving feedback and revising your work as needed. Everyone who is not selected for publication will receive a personalized note that includes one piece of encouraging feedback.
A Note on Our Values
This project—an extension of the we the soil newsletter (a monthly curated workshop listing)—is all about celebrating creative community.
We are aware of the ways that elitism/classism and various other forms of oppression play out in the submission and publication process, so we strive to counteract that violence with a warm & inviting ethos—one that cares about poets/writers as people while prioritizing publishing poems that are crafted to move us to feel more deeply.
We care about sustainability, which inspires our practice of slowing down to read and respond to all submitted work with care. This is why our submissions will always be capped.
We believe that writers should be paid for their work, but we are currently unable to pay our contributors. We will be actively working toward paying our contributors in the near future.
Lastly, we deeply appreciate our readers . We hope that you find poetry that you will continue to hold close while also learning about teachers, poets, workshops, writing communities, residencies, and more. We hope to nourish more creative community for all of us.