Daring to Fail: How to Begin and Sustain a Poetry Submission Practice

Interested in learning how to get your poems published, individually in journals and as book-length collections? Come and hear from a poet with experience on both sides of the publication equation. Francesca Bell has been avidly collecting rejections (and acceptances) for more than twenty years. She has served as the poetry editor of River Styx, a guest editor for B O D Y, and is a current translation editor for Los Angeles Review. She'll share what she's learned about the importance of researching your target publishers, how to format submissions, how to write a cover letter, how to choose which poems go together, how to interact with editors, and, most importantly, how to manage the inevitable disappointments along the way and use failure to your advantage. She will even share some of her voluminous submission logs so you can check out her vast rejection history firsthand. 

Space is limited. Please, register at the San Rafael Library’s website in order to save a spot.