After six years, Really System is on indefinite hiatus. Archived issues will remain available, so you can still read all of the amazing work!
Before you submit, please read an issue or two to get a sense of the type of work we are looking for.
Submissions should be no more than 10 pages. Please use an easily legible serif font. Submissions are accepted .doc, docx, .rtf, and .pdf formats.
Submitted work must not have been previously published elsewhere.
No cover letter is necessary, but you have to type something in the Submittable form so why not be nice? If your work is accepted we will be in touch for an up-to-date biographical note near the time of publication.
Submit only once per reading period. If your work has recently appeared in Really System, wait an issue or two before submitting again.
Simultaneous submissions are just fine, so long as you notify us if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. If you need to withdraw only a poem or two from a submission, email editor@reallysystem.org rather than withdrawing the submission from Submittable.
Rights-wise, we only ask that you grant us first-time serial rights to publish your poems on the Internet, that we be able to archive that work with the issue it appears in, and that you give us permission to include your work in our experimentation (indexing/frequency analysis/visualization/part-of-speech tagging/etc.) with our archived issues in RS_Lab Wait, what?!. Before we include any work in our print annual, we will contact you for permission & you'll receive a copy when it's published.
Really System pays $10 per published poem.
If you have questions, please contact Patrick at editor@reallysystem.org
When submissions are open, a link to our Submittable page will appear here. -->
—Patrick Williams, Founder & Editor-in-Chief
If you'd like to help us to support our poets, please use the donate button below:
*Maybe this sounds weird; if we accept your work and you are uncomfortable with that, we can talk. What's most important to us is that you retain the rights to your work and that you are comfortable with how it is represented in Really System. Back to top