Tab Journal

The Special Call: Print Issue 2025 is underway. If you don’t see submission forms here, Tab Journal is temporarily closed to new submissions while we catch up.

Information about the editorial process

TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics welcomes submissions of original poems in English, English translations of poems in other languages, scholarly or creative essays about poetry, interviews, visual poems, art-poetry hybrids. We're open to possibilities, as long as it has to do with poetry or poetics, and we welcome submissions from writers with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, voices, and aesthetics, including work by BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and D/disabled writers. .

To reduce barriers to access and with support from Chapman University, Tab Journal does not charge a submission fee. In addition, while we cannot guarantee payment, we hope to pay $75 to each contributor for as long as the budget allows. We understand that if we are not able to offer payment for work we accept, an author may withdraw their submission. 

We consider simultaneous submissions, but if the work is accepted elsewhere, writers must contact us immediately through Submittable with a message to withdraw that part of your submission or use the "withdraw" function to withdraw your entire submission.

Chapman University (the institutional home of Tab Journal) shall have First North American Serial Rights to publish accepted work electronically and/or in print. Publication rights revert to the author upon publication in Tab Journal, but we do retain permission to republish and to submit to other outlets such as the Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. In addition, we ask that subsequent publication of the work acknowledge its first publication in Tab Journal. Also, for poems, we require poets to provide an audio file or give Tab Journal permission to make a recording of the accepted work for added reading experience and accessibility; instructions will be provided when acceptance is confirmed.

Please do not submit more than once in a six-month period unless asked to do so.

Information about the submission form

Please use the form appropriate for the type of work you're submitting. Read those specific guidelines within the form.

Tab Journal does not consider previously published work, work by individuals with current or recent affiliation with Chapman University (e.g., faculty, students, staff), or work by individuals under 18 years of age (with the exception of our partnership with the California Coastal Commission K-12 poetry contest). You'll be prompted to complete a short eligibility form before you can access the main submission form.

The submission form itself requires a title for the work (which will be the submission's identifying label) as well as your name, pronouns, and email address. We also ask whether you want to receive the Tab Musings newsletter.

In addition, we've added three demographic questions to the form to help us understand our submissions pool. Initial readers do not see the answers to these questions, individual data is not shared externally, and each question offers the option "I prefer not to answer." This portion of the form is part of our ongoing work to track aggregate demographic data and create an increasingly inclusive literary project.

We invite you to include a short cover letter that includes a biographical/professional statement to add context for your submission. In addition, for visual poems, we appreciate context related to medium, sources, and process. For translations, context for the original text(s) and assurance of that you have permission to publish translations is helpful. We also invite you to share your social media url/handle(s). Both these components are optional and are not viewable by initial readers.

The last step before submitting the form is to upload your file. Because the initial review is done anonymously, do not include your name in the file name or inside the file.

More information

If you don’t happen to see submission forms here, Tab Journal is temporarily closed to new submissions while we catch up with what’s in our queue and plan for the future. If that's the case, check back in a few weeks.

If you are experiencing problems with this form or require assistance, please contact the staff using the Contact form on the website; if you don't get response within two weeks, you are welcome to contact the Editor at her Chapman University email. We will be happy to assist in filling it out together.

We revise our policies and practices with each new volume. You can peruse the Archives to see how Tab Journal has changed over the years. You can also use the Contact form to let us know what we're doing particularly well or might improve in the future