Thank you for your interest in Frozen Sea — we're glad you're here!

Please read below for our submission guidelines, to see if we might be a good fit for you, and for a few important notes about publishing with us. Frozen Sea publishes poetry and visual art/photography, and we are an online-only publication.

We have only just recently started using Submittable to handle submissions — if anything seems amiss, please let us know. Our editorial email is: editor [at] frozensea [dot] org

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered for Frozen Sea. 

•  Send 3 – 5 pieces. We would love to read work that is your personal favorite and, for whatever reason, has not yet found publication. Include a brief and friendly cover letter that tells us the titles of your poems/art and includes a short (~50 word) third-person bio. You can visit this link if you'd like a cover letter template: https://frozensea.org/cover-letter-template
• We want to be the first platform to publish your work—please don’t send previously published work. 
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted: please let us know, as soon as you can, if your work finds publication elsewhere by sending us a Message on Submittable (not the Notes feature — we won't see those!)  
• It is challenging for us to preserve the original formatting of poems with long lines or lots of negative space. Any lines longer than 50 characters may get broken in an unfortunate way due to website formatting. We recommend sending shorter poems—think sonnet-y things. Poems over 30 lines or so often feel a tad long for us, our apologies, though we don’t have an exact line limit.  
• If we decline your submission, please wait until the next reading period to send work. Reading periods are open for two weeks after each issue is published. Multiple submissions sent within the same reading period will not be considered.
• Please be nice to us; we will be nice to you. 

ABOUT US

• Frozen Sea has no reading fee. We do not offer payment at this time. We wish we could. We’re currently scheming ways to get funding.    
• We are especially interested in publishing work from early-career/emerging poets (poets who have yet to publish a full-length collection, or have recently published a full-length collection). We also consider work from poets who have published multiple full-length collections—we want to lead readers to their next favorite poets.  
• We publish visual art too, acknowledging that poetry does not have to be confined to the written word.  
• We nominate for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Poems selected for publication in Frozen Sea may be submitted to Verse Daily.   
• We are a small team, although we aim to reply to submissions within 30 days. Feel free to send us a message through Submittable if we’re taking entirely too long to respond.  

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT PUBLISHING WITH US

• Each issue publishes on the 15th of the month. We'll publish four issues in 2025: Issue Seven on February 15, Issue Eight on April 15, Issue Nine on August 15,  and Issue Ten on October 15.

• If your work appears in Frozen Sea, please include Frozen Sea on an acknowledgments page when it appears in a collection — and let us know if you have a book coming out, so we can help spread the word! 💙

• If we select your work for publication, Frozen Sea will retain worldwide First Serial Rights and worldwide First Electronic Rights. (Meaning: once your work is published in Frozen Sea, the copyright immediately reverts to you.) We also reserve the right to keep your work on our website in perpetuity, and to promote it on social media channels including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Bluesky.