about the dancing girl press series
Started in 2004, the dancing girl press chapbook series issues a number of exquisite open edition chapbooks by women authors every year, as well as a handful of full-length collections. Manuscripts are selected from our open reading period every summer, the guidelines for which may be found below. The imprint is devoted to issuing innovative work by women (including female identifying, trans, and non-binary authors.), as well exploring the boundaries of book-making, hybridity, and the visual/written arts.
What do we look for?
We especially love longer or shorter collections that offer both narrative and precision of language. Or that which engages and deconstructs existing texts, pop culture, media, art, history, folklore and other subjects. We also have a taste for the strange, surreal, and decidedly gothic, so love to see those books come over the digital transom.
We pretty much consider "poetry" to be a broad field, encompassing traditional verse, prose and hybrid genre work, vispo, found texts, dramatic or performance driven poems, and lyric essays. If you have a chapbook length manuscript that defies genre and expectations, we would love to see it. Yearly, we choose a wide range of works, from more traditional personal lyric and narrative poetry to highly experimental and language/based work.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
dgp is happy to accept manuscripts from poets at all stages of their career for publication in our annual book series. With our recent switch to expanded distribution and perfect-bound printing in March 2026, we are accepting submissions of both chapbooks (under 50 pages) and full-length collections (over 50 pages) this reading period. We plan to publish a varying number of titles per year chosen from our favorites of the manuscripts we receive each summer.
Since all shop profits get recycled into upcoming books, while we can not offer a monetary prize or payment for those manuscripts chosen to be published in the series, we do offer a payment of 10 copies of the chapbook to the authors chosen (or 25 copies for full-length manuscripts over 50 pages.) We also offer generous discount (40%) on additional copies the author may wish to purchase to sell themselves at readings and events. Books will be available both through the dancing girl press shop and distributed via Ingram to other online book outlets like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
Chapbooks must be between 18 and 49 pages, numbered accordingly, with only one poem per page. Full lengths typically fall in the 50-150 page range. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please let us know ASAP if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. We aim to keep your work no longer than three months. Please feel free to query us after that time has passed.
Submissions are accepted via e-mail as attachments in Microsoft word only. Please include “Submission/LAST NAME” in your subject line.
Submissions are currently CLOSED
Next Reading Period: June 1st-August 31st, 2026
Send all submissions/correspondence to dancinggirlpress@yahoo.com