Welcome to the Poets Reading the News open call for poetry about current events. 

Before you submit, please review our full submission guidelines.

One submission may be under review at a time; each submission can include up to three (3) poems.

We are committed to featuring essential voices that have been underrepresented throughout journalistic and poetic history. We particularly encourage writers of color, women writers, LGBTQI+ writers, emergent writers, low-income/no-income writers, and/or writers near and far to submit their writing.

We ask that you help sustain Poets Reading the News if you are able by paying a modest submission fee to offset our Submittable costs. Thank you so much for sharing your writing with us. We look forward to reading your poetry!
 

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Poets Reading the News is the groundbreaking news publication for original poetry about current events. Our purpose is to enact poetry’s vital cultural function as a processor for violence, cultural complexity, and political change. We provide breaking poetry coverage on a diverse range of critical contemporary issues, including gun violence, politics, technology and climate change and are home to Pulitzer Prize winners, national poet laureates, and emergent writers.

Poets Reading the News begins 2025 with an open call led by Kashiana Singh, poet, author and Poets Reading the News managing editor. Here in the heart of winter, at the edge of accelerating change, we turn to that which offers nourishment, endurance and connection - tools which will be vital in the years to come.

The act of creating and consuming both food and poetry is intended to gather and collect breath, a process whereby we go inwards, where silence finds a resting ground. Eating can be called an act of meditation, and poetry has been likened to prayer over the centuries. And while nourishment is personal, it is traditionally most powerful as a community act, encompassing relationships, cultures, identities, memory, medicine, bodies and economies. Writing with food therefore is an act of communal healing and an embodied transition of memory.

Poets are invited into this open call through many doorways, with an eye to where the kitchen table stands within the present world. Possible entrances include recipes for change or reclamations of traditional cooking practices. Use food as a marker of key milestones in your personal and sociopolitical existence. Investigate scarcity and hunger, or food's complex relationship to colonization, the feminine, faith and family. Share dinner table conversations. Explore food systems, labor, health and sustainability. Document food as protest, or pen odes in honor of the farmers or elders who nourish us.

Surprise us. 

Bring us to your table. 

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Kashiana Singh is the author of, most recently, The Witching Hour (Glass Lyre Press, 2024). Kashiana's full-length collection Woman by the Door was published in 2022 with Apprentice House Press. Her poetry collection Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Crushed Anthills, her second chapbook, is a collection of poems and photographs through which she unravels her journey through ten cities. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to her life mantra of Work as Worship. Besides being a learner of poetry, Kashiana serves as the Vice President of Operations at a professional services firm and also serves as Managing Editor of Poets Reading the News.  Her poetry ambassadorship came to life with her work at Poets Reading the News, North Carolina Poetry Society, and Matwaala Collective amongst many others. She has led multiple panels and workshops on the topic of how food invokes and intersects with poetry.

Kashiana will be teaching an online writing workshop, Poetry Begins at the Kitchen Table, for Tupelo Press on February 22, 2025. Learn more here.

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Please review our submission guidelines in advance of sending us your poetry. One poem may be included per submission for this open call. Poetry on topics outside the open call's scope can be submitted through our general poetry submissions form.