News from the Wildhouse Poetry Imprint
Manuscript Submissions Open on October 15, 2026
Poetry Editor Mark Burrows sets his sights on new poetry manuscripts this fall. Full manuscripts (70-85 pages in length) will be accepted via Submittable. Writers who align with the Wildhouse Publishing mission of connecting “spiritual but not religious” folks with meaningful, transformative books are encouraged to send us their best work.
Submissions should include a cover letter introducing the author and their collection. It should also include the proposed submission in its entirety. The proposal should clarify the author’s platform and their readiness to work with Wildhouse Publishing to publicize their work (via social media platforms, readings, etc.).
Submissions can be made through the Wildhouse Publishing Submittable. Submissions to Wildhouse Poetry close on November 30, 2026.
Marjorie Maddox receives several honors
Wildhouse Publishing Poet Wins Nautilus Award
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer won a Silver Nautilus Award in May 2025. Her winning book, The Unfolding, published by Wildhouse Poetry in October 2024, explores the in-between space of sorrow and wonder in the face of devastating loss. After rising to the #1 spot of Amazon’s New Releases for Grief, Loss, and Death Poetry shortly after it’s release, The Unfolding continues to ‘wow’ readers with its shimmering prose and the urgent ask for self-compassion.
Read more about Rosemerry’s accomplishment here.
About the Wildhouse Poetry Imprint
Poems happen to us. They are ‘experiences’ that effect something within us. They call us not to comprehend something, but rather to participate in the reality they gesture toward. As epiphanies, poems often do this in the ways they take us by surprise. Startlement is their familiar mode of entry. As Jane Hirshfield suggests, they ‘transport us into previously unanticipatable comprehensions,’ luring us beyond familiar assumptions, offering us glimpses as she puts it of ‘the as-yet-undiscovered [which] brings an enlargement of life.’”
—Mark S. Burrows, editor of Wildhouse Poetry
Wildhouse Poetry seeks writers who engage readers’ imagination and encourage them to find authentic ways of seeing and experiencing life in the midst of its complexities. We look for poems with a clear and recognizable voice, one rooted in reality and carried by the natural music of language. Rainer Maria Rilke once suggested that “poems are not, as many think, a matter of feelings; they are, rather, experiences.”
As experiences, they invite us to grasp something of our connectedness within the wider fabric of life. They open us into dimensions of life’s inexhaustible realities and ground us within the physical world to which we belong. Our interest is in poetry whose epiphanies remind us that our lives are subtler and more complex than we often imagine. Such poems should suggest something of what Robert Frost described as “an idea caught fresh in the act of dawning.” They should reflect Wildhouse Publications’ commitment “to bring transformative spiritual insights to readers for whom traditional religious expressions may not fit.”
