Dear Blackoceanographers,

After over ten years without charging any reading fees, this is the first year we have started charging a fee for the open reading—after a significant amount of anguish and debate. The primary driver for this was that Submittable itself started costing us money to use as a submission manager. While the service is incredibly valuable as a tool to collect and review the hundreds of submissions that come in, it is no longer free for publishers to use (and hasn't been for a couple of years). In order to recoup our expenses to consider your work, we had a choice: charge a small fee of a few dollars just ro read the work, or charge a $15 fee to read the work and offer you a free book from our catalog in exchange. After a very un-scientific poll of a number of customers at AWP, we decided to go with the later option.

Please keep in mind that we are entirely volunteer run, and that every penny from book sales  (and no reading fees) goes back into expanding the Black Ocean catalog. We hope you will accept this change with us in stride, and see it as an opportunity to support a press that you would trust with your own work while adding one of our titles to your own personal library.

And now, the guidelines:

• Entries must be submitted between June 1 and June 30, 2019.
• Poets of all genders, races, ages, sexual preferences, abilities, and cultural backgrounds are enthusiastically encouraged to send us their work.
• The poems can be previously published in journals or anthologies, but should not have appeared in a previous book, including self-published books.
• Poetry manuscripts should be 48 to 125 pages, single-spaced and on an 8-1/2" x 11" or A4 page only. Submissions are preferred in PDF format. If you cannot make a PDF, then please send as a Word document. 
• We are not accepting unsolicited prose manuscripts or translations at this time. 
• Only one manuscript per person. 
• Please do not resubmit a manuscript from previous years without truly significant revision. 
• Include: a cover letter with a brief biographical note, and an acknowledgments page listing previous publications. 
• Manuscript revisions are not permitted during the open reading.