Welcome to Light's portal for poems tied to recent events in the news. For less timely stuff, please go back a page and use our regular-issues portal. 

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●The weekly Poems of the Week (POTW) submission deadline is Friday at noon, Pacific Time (3pm EST).

● In a single electronic file, submit up to two funny, well-crafted, unpublished poems tied to something currently in the news, political or otherwise. (Avoid simply summarizing what happened.) See "When submitting work to Light" section below, for definition of what we consider unpublished.

Use one of the following formats:

Word document (.doc or .docx) files
  Rich Text Format (.rtf) files

● Put "Poems of the Week" in your title field.

● Since Light has a blind submissions policy, as much as possible, don't put your name in the title of your submission or in the file containing your poems. Instead, share identifying info in your cover letter only. The cover letter should include your name, e-mail address, snail-mail address and phone number. You don't need to send a bio with Poem of the Week submissions.

● We don't consider simultaneous submissions.

● Unless you're invited to do so, please don't resubmit a poem that wasn't chosen from an earlier submission.

● Submissions will be read by Editor-in-Chief Melissa Balmain and Managing Editor Kevin Durkin, or by a guest editor (to be announced).

● Except for the procedures described above, all our usual guidelines and policies apply. (See "Poems for regular issues of Light" guidelines.)

SUBMISSIONS FOR REGULAR ISSUES OF LIGHT
  See separate guidelines page.

ACCEPTED POEMS OF THE WEEK

Poems chosen from among each week's POTW submissions will run the following Monday (three days after the submission deadline); if you don't receive an acceptance by Tuesday, feel free to submit your poem elsewhere. On rare occasions (and with notice to the poet), we might hold an accepted POTW to run another week, or consider a POTW submission for one of Light's biannual issues instead. All published POTWs will be archived and searchable on Light's website, just like poems in our regular issues.

Like most poetry magazines, Light is a nonpaying market—at least for now. We seek non-exclusive rights to your work. (See below.)

When submitting work to Light, you agree that:

● It's original work, by you, and you hold the copyright.
  ● It has never appeared online before, outside of a workshop or private social-media page.
  ● It hasn't been published in a print (paper) journal or anthology within the previous two years. (If it has appeared in a print book you wrote, though, that's fine.)
  ● If the work is accepted by Light, you will not publish it elsewhere before it appears in Light. After the work appears in Light, you are free to reprint it wherever you like, but please include a credit line saying it was first published in Light and, when possible, include a link to our home page.
  ● While you retain all rights to your poem/s, we have non-exclusive electronic permission to post accepted work in our online archives and share it through social media and/or live presentations.
  ● We have your permission to include your published poem/s in a printed anthology. If possible, you will receive compensation for such an inclusion, either in dollars or copies.

If you have questions not answered here, feel free to contact Light’s editors at lightpoetrymagazine@gmail.com