Bear Review is an online journal of poetry. We only accept unpublished work and we acquire first rights. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please let us know if the work is accepted elsewhere.
We accept submissions on a rolling basis through our submissions manager.
- Attach submissions as a single .pdf or .docx document.
- Include a brief note and/or bio (200 words maximum) with your submission.
- Please send no more than three to five poems per submission.
- Even though we are adjusting to handling an increase in submissions volume, we promise to do our best to respond in four to six months. Please do not query until six months have passed since the date of your submission.
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Why we now charge for submissions:
We are a group of friends who devote our precious off hours to this journal. We receive no support from grants or institutions, and every cent we raise here offsets the costs associated with our website and the use of Submittable. Any leftover funds will go to an annual Editors' Prize, for which all writers we publish will be considered.
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Thank you for trusting us with your work. We look forward to reading it soon.
Contest Guidelines:
- The contest entry fee is $15, which will go toward paying our judge, administrative costs, and providing a monetary award of $500 to our contest winner.
- Each submission should contain 1-3 poems for consideration in a single document (Word docx or PDF).
- All submissions will be received electronically through Submittable to ensure anonymity during the selection process. Entrants should not include any identifying information within their submission. Neither emailed nor hard copies will be accepted.
- Bear Review’s editors will conduct a preliminary review of all submissions and forward a selection of 15-20 poems to a contest judge (which we will select each year). This year's judge is Cass Donish.
- If the content of any submission provides the judge with any identifying information, that submission will be excluded from the contest.
- Students who are currently enrolled at any institution where the judge teaches or has recently taught, or faculty teaching there, are not eligible to apply; neither are students who have been enrolled at this institution in the past five years. Close friends of the contest judge are not eligible to enter. We define a close friend as someone who has had coffee, brunch, dinner, drinks or has met up for any form of hanging out in-person or on an online call or chat.
- Submissions received for our bi-annual issues will not be considered for the contest. We might, however, offer publication to poets whose poems come close but do not win or place as winner, runner-up, or finalists.
- Contest submissions will open at midnight on November 1 and close at midnight on December 31st (though the submission deadline may be extended).
- The winning poem, and other poems selected by the judge as runner-up (one) and finalists (as many as four), will be published in the Spring-2025 issue of Bear Review.
- We subscribe to the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Contest Code of Ethics. We take our integrity very seriously and will conduct this contest as ethically as possible. If any conflict of interest should arise, we will address it as ethically and fairly as we can. When needed, we will consult with a Poetry Advisor on our Board.