Poor Yorick is open for submissions from Sept. 1 - Jan 1. Submissions will be considered to be published in either our Spring 2025 issue or to be featured on the Poor Yorick website! 

The theme of this year's submissions is Anniversaries and the Passage of Time:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing program at Western Connecticut State University. Anniversaries are often a time of celebration and commemoration; they are a time to reflect on the past and anticipate the future. Other times, anniversaries are a period of mourning or more complex emotions. Regardless, they exist because of our perseverance, our determination, and the communities that help carry us through.

For this issue, Poor Yorick seeks inventive, imaginative, bold, and daring works that explore the significance of anniversaries, milestones, and/or the passage of time and our relationship to it. How does distance change our understanding or experience of past events? How does time alter  our identities and relationships? How have significant anniversaries or milestones–defined broadly–shaped our lives? Take this theme and run with it.

General Guidelines:

• Submit all work through Submittable 
• We do not accept emailed or mailed submissions 
• We do not accept previously published material 
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission 
• If you have previously had work published in Poor Yorick, please wait a year before submitting your work again
• Attach your submission as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf document 
• Include a brief cover letter and three-to-five sentence third-person bio with your submission 
• We typically respond to submissions in one-to-three  months. If you receive no response by then, you may email editor@pooryorickjournal.com to inquire
• Unfortunately we cannot pay contributors at this time

Authors’ Rights

If your work is accepted and you consent to its publication, you grant Poor Yorick Exclusive Internet Rights to publish the work. Accepted work will be featured on Poor Yorick‘s website for at least eight weeks and will be archived on the website thereafter. Poor Yorick retains the right to archive accepted work indefinitely and to promote it electronically.

You retain all print rights and other electronic rights. If you do reprint all or a portion of the work, we appreciate the acknowledgment of first publication.