submissions

June Road Press is committed to amplifying the voices of emerging writers. We’re an intentionally tiny operation and dedicated to quality, so we publish very few new books each year—but we’re eager to find the next great fit, and we welcome unsolicited, unagented submissions with no required fee during open reading periods.

winter 2025–26 Open Reading Period:

ANTHOLOGY EDITION!

We’re open for submissions until February 1, 2026, and we’re mixing things up this cycle—instead of full-length manuscript submissions, we’re looking for individual poems for inclusion in our first anthology, with a projected publication date of late 2026. (Our poetry line will continue, and details will appear here when we’re accepting other types of submissions.)

This anthology will be loosely organized as a cross-country road trip: a tour of new voices from different regions of the United States. In keeping with the spirit and orientation of our full-length collections, we’re particularly interested in work that engages in meaningful ways with nature or place—the more specifically place-based or regionally inflected, the better suited to this project.

Guidelines and preferences to note:

• Simultaneous submissions are fine; we want great writing to find a home elsewhere if it can’t be with us.

• Please only submit once for consideration in this reading period—but your submission may include up to three poems (from which we’ll select one, if accepted).

• To balance production considerations and the number of contributors we can include, we’re looking for poems that will fit on one to two typeset pages.

• Submitted poems should be previously unpublished in a book (publication in a literary magazine or journal, online, or in a chapbook is fine as long as you retain the copyright); the work should not require permission to reprint.

• Your submission should be in English, original, singly authored, and in no part AI-generated.

• Due to distribution and resource constraints and the framework of this project, we’re currently limiting submissions to U.S. residents.

• We’re aiming to publish primarily emerging writers in this volume, loosely defined as those with no more than two published books.

• We invite you to include a condensed author bio with your submission of under 80 words. A brief author note will appear in the anthology for each contributor, aimed at lightly grounding the piece and helping a reader find more of your writing, and while this can be added later in the process, we’d welcome a draft along with your submission. This is meant to be an exercise in creative compression; it might include notable details about your background, regional connections, writing accomplishments, and/or passions.

To submit your work, please use the button below or go here to access the submission platform Duosuma (you’ll need a Duotrope account, which is free). You’ll be prompted to enter your name and email address and to upload your submission as a single Word or PDF file that includes up to three poems. The optional mini-bio described above may be included in the file or added in the author bio field shown during the submission process. In the cover letter field, feel free to provide, informally, any further context or notes about yourself, your writing, and/or a connection to the project or the press, though this too is optional. There’s no fee to submit (just the choice to make a small donation, which doesn’t factor into selections but does help us out a lot).

We encourage you to explore the rest of our website, particularly the individual pages for the books we’ve published so far, to get acquainted with the press and how your work might fit before submitting.

We plan to respond to all submissions by or in March. Accepted contributors will receive personal editorial feedback, the opportunity to review a proof, and a complimentary copy of the print book upon publication.

We also plan to make an audiobook edition of the anthology, and we’ll be inviting contributors to record their poem for inclusion. All contributors will receive a copy of the finished audiobook.