Poemancer: A Poetry Journey is a forthcoming card game that poets can use to write inspired poetry. As such, we intend to feature excellent, thought-provoking poems in the game to prompt and inspire the players’ own poetry writing.
We invite you to submit your poetry to this rare opportunity. Your work will be featured in a card game and inspire countless poets to come.
The poems we publish in this game will feature in our Transformation Deck. This deck serves to help poets think about revision, while also conveying principles of successfully written poetry.
Here is an example of what a Transformation Card looks like. Note: We are not using the poem in this card precisely because we do not have the rights to actually publish this poem.
Some prompts that exist in our current draft of the Transformation Deck include:
However, we encourage you not to write to these prompts, or to any pre-conceived notions of what we might be looking for. All we are interested in is successful poetry. If we decide to publish your poem in Poemancer, we will retrofit a principle of successful poetry to pair with your poem.
Looking for some inspiration before you submit? Check out our poetry prompts page!
Submissions to Poemancer will be read blindly.
Please abide by the following submission guidelines. Submissions that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered.
Because these poems will be featured on printed cards, your poem must fit within certain physical constraints.
Your poem will certainly fit on our card if, on a word document, it fits within:
This is 30-35 characters per line, 14 lines long (including line breaks).
Here’s a downloadable file with those size constraints that you can use to type your poem in!
We are aware that this constrains a lot of possibilities within poetry. Certainly, we would love to showcase longer, more narrative poems and works of different forms and complexities. Nonetheless, successful poetry is regularly written within these length limits.
For inspiration and examples, take a look at these prompt pages for writing short poetry:
Poemancer will request First North American Serial Rights (FNASR) for publication of your poem.
Additionally, all accepted poets will receive*:
*Contingent upon successful fundraising and launch of Poemancer. We are currently planning to promote a Kickstarter for the game in mid-April, followed by publication of the game by the end of 2026. Payment will be made after we reach our fundraising goal, and your free copy of the game will be distributed upon publication.
If we do not meet our fundraising goals, rights will revert back immediately to poets whose work was accepted for the game.
Submissions are free! Fill out the below form with your work.
The submission window closes after 500 submissions. We hope to reply back to all poets no later than March 15th, 2026.
