Thank you for your interest in submitting to Open Heart Forgery. There are a few submission guidelines:
1) No hate. No sexism. No racism.
2) Maximum 28 lines long (not including title and your byline), and maximum 43 letters wide. Submissions exceeding these guidelines may be accepted, space permitting.
In addition, you may submit a short note (maximum 100 words) with the poem, discussing the inspiration, purpose, writing process, or anything else you’d like to say about the poem. This is optional, will be printed online with the poem, may be included in our e-newsletter, and may be edited.
3) Only Halifax Regional Municipality residents, to keep OHF a local community journal. However, submissions from out of Halifax may be accepted for online publication, provided the contributor has some connection to Nova Scotia. Please see OHF Abroad, below.
4) OHF publishes primarily English poetry, but may consider French submissions. French submissions should be accompanied by an English translation, however this is not for publication (unless requested by the author). OHF is currently unable to consider poems in other languages.
5) The fine print:
- You retain copyright of your work. By submitting your work, you are granting Open Heart Forgery a non-exclusive right to publish it once, in our newsletter and on our website. You may be asked for permission to publish the work in an anthology collection.
- You acknowledge that you are the copyright owner of the work submitted. You are welcome to submit your previously published work, but original work is preferred. If the work has previously been published, please provide that information with your submission.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please inform us if the poem is published elsewhere before we publish it.
- We respond to most submissions within 2 months.
- You should retain a copy of your submission.
- Our posting a poem on our website does not guarantee it will be available online in the future.
- No payment is made for any submission.
- Printed copies of the newsletter are available at launch meetings.
- All contributors are invited to submit a short biography, which may be edited for length and content. The biography can include a link to your site.
- You may request removal of your poem from the site at any time, however poems cannot be removed from the PDF issues (electronic and paper), and may remain available online through various repositories. Removal requests may take several weeks to process. Publication of your poem by Open Heart Forgery may make it ineligible for submission elsewhere. Another publisher may still consider the author or the poem as published, even if it has been removed from the site.
Send your poems to us using the Contact Form on the bottom of the Home Page.
OHF Abroad If you are not a resident of Halifax, but are a resident of Nova Scotia, or have some connection to Nova Scotia (former resident, frequent visitor, etc.), you are welcome to submit poems for consideration for our web-only OHF Abroad page. These submissions may be printed (once) in a future special issue of Open Heart Forgery.
Submissions are limited to one per month. Your name and current town will be printed with the poem. Your connection to Nova Scotia will not be printed, but you are welcome to include that in a biography.
In addition to the content and length rules above, your submission must include the following:
- Indicate the poem is for “OHF Abroad.”
- Provide your town in Nova Scotia, or if you are not a resident of Nova Scotia, your town, province or state, and country, and your connection to Nova Scotia.
- If this is your first submission, please include your real name, and some online evidence of that, such as a social media profile. Your real name, if different from your author name, will not printed.
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