Every Tuesday, The Margins publishes the work of emerging and established Asian American and diasporic poets. We publish English-language poems and translations of poems.

We pay contributors $50 to $90 (USD) for original and translated poetry; the fee varies based on the number and length of poems we publish. We may offer additional payment to the author of translated poems, depending on the work’s publication status. We do not pay for reprints.

Please allow four to six months for a response. Submissions close 11:59 EST. 

We are open to all styles, forms, and subjects. We’re drawn to poetry that:

• Transforms the mundane into the magical with unexpected imagery
• Reflects on personal and/or cultural history
• Responds to or reshapes the view on current events and issues
• Introduces or reimagines historical and literary figures
• Illuminates through translation the work of an Asian author who is not known or read (widely) by a general Anglophone audience
• Challenges, subverts, or expands formal, linguistic, and genre conventions
• Explores humorous, abject, or profane languages and/or themes

Guidelines:

• Submissions should be no longer than 5 pages total. Each poem must start on a new page. Though we do consider longer poems, we tend to select poems no longer than 3 pages.
• If you are submitting translations, please acquire translation and publication permission from the author and/or press prior to submission.
• Please use a standard serif (e.g., Constantia, Garamond, Times New Roman) or sans-serif font (e.g. Arial, Calibri) in font size no smaller than 12, unless there is a specific formal and visual reason to do otherwise.
• We prefer submissions in the .docx form but also accept PDFs.
• We allow simultaneous submissions. If a part of your submitted manuscript has been accepted elsewhere, please send a message with the unavailable title(s) on Submittable. If your entire manuscript becomes unavailable, please withdraw the submission.
• Most of our submissions are individual works. However, collaborative work will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
• We do not require any preliminary information in the cover letter, though you are welcome to include pertinent or necessary details about yourself or the submission. We will collect your updated bio upon acceptance. (Nice notes and hellos do not affect the decision, but we do appreciate them!)
• We accept previously published poems, as long as they have not appeared digitally in other venues. Please note any previously published works in your submission.

The following call for submissions has been curated by Megan Pinto & Kiran Bath. 

“Who are you and whom do you love?” asks Bhanu Kapil in The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. In this polyvocal collection, Kapil weaves personal and imagined histories into a tapestry of women’s postcolonial experience, moving back and forth between South Asia and the diaspora. Abstraction, collage, docupoetics, and the prose poem are just some of the formal devices that allow for this movement. 

As two authors engaging with intergenerational storytelling, personal archives, and memory, we are interested in expanding how we write about our own lineages, using imagination to look backward—writing into the gaps that history, or silence, has left behind—and forward, into the future as a place that is informed by a reimagined history.

To write about who we are and the people that we love, we must observe, learn, and glean what we can from the intimacies of our relationships—and navigate what goes unsaid. Can you write around a secret without giving it away? Or does writing the secret set you, or the ones you love, free? What happens when you, as Megan compels us in “Earth-Like,”  “imagine you could begin again”? What is it like to, as Kiran directs in “How to take root,” “imagine a nonlinear lineage”? 

We invite you to submit to “Imagined Histories,” a new folio to be published in The Margins in late 2025. We want your best poems (ghazals, free verse, sonnets, prose poems, hybrid forms, all styles welcome) or visual art (think photo essays, maps, collages, drawings). Experimental and hybrid works are welcome as are traditional forms. Our mission to catalog our collected visions, confessions, and dreaming. 

For reference, we are looking for new work in the tradition of:

• Bhanu Kapil: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Schizophrene, Incubation: A Space for Monsters
• Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric
• Emily Jungmin Yoon: A Cruelty Special to Our Species
• Marwa Helal: Invasive species
• Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: Hello, the Roses
• Hala Alyan: The Twenty-Ninth Year
• Victoria Chang: Obit
• Morgan Parker: Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
• Divya Victor: Curb, Kith

Submissions are open until July 15th, 2025. You can only submit one poem to ONE open call at AAWW at a time. If you have already submitted to Poetry Tuesday, you can NOT also submit to this call. 

Guidelines:

• Cover Letter: Your cover letter should include a biography of up to 60 words and a description up to 150 words on why you chose your particular engagement with Lineages.
• Poetry: Submit any number of poems totaling no more than six pages. Each poem must start on a new page.
• Art/graphic work: Please submit up to six pages of work with enough detail that we can read the text in JPG, GIF, PNG, or PDF files.
• If you are submitting translations, please acquire translation and publication permission from the author and/or press prior to submission. Please submit both the original piece and the translation.
• Please use a standard serif (e.g., Constantia, Garamond, Times New Roman) or sans-serif font (e.g., Arial, Calibri) in font size no smaller than 12, unless there is a specific formal and visual reason to do otherwise.
• We prefer submissions in the .docx form but also accept PDFs.
• We allow simultaneous submissions. If a part of your submitted manuscript has been accepted elsewhere, please send a message with the unavailable title(s) on Submittable. If your entire manuscript becomes unavailable, please withdraw the submission.

Writers can expect a reply within three to four months after the submission period closes.

We pay all writers and translators. Please refer to our rate sheet for details.

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AAWW is an organization that believes in the power of art to advocate for and center the voices and ideas on the margins. Our award-winning digital magazine, The Margins, publishes work by Asian, Asian American, and Asian diasporic writers (including but not limited to East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, MENA [Middle Eastern and North African], Indo-Caribbean, Central Asian, Arab, and Arabophone, Pacific Islander, and Iranian writers) as well as multiracial writers. The Margins publishes Black, Latinx, and Indigenous writers. We welcome work from LGBTQIA, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming writers. Our work exists within the intersections of these identities and offers a new countercultural space in which to imagine a more just future.