Submit your work
Glyph publishes whole pieces by poets and authors in the New York metro area. Submissions are open, read by a person, and cost nothing to make.
What to send
Up to five poems, or one prose piece of up to about two thousand words —
whichever you would want a stranger to read first. Paste it into the email
body if you can; a .docx, .txt or
.pdf attachment is fine too. Line breaks matter here and are
preserved exactly as you send them, so send it laid out the way you want it
set.
Alongside the work:
- Your name as you want it printed.
- Two or three sentences of bio, in your own words rather than ours.
- Where in the metro area you are based — neighbourhood or town, your call.
- Any links you want on the page: your site, wherever your books are sold.
- Whether any of it has appeared elsewhere. Previously published work is welcome; we just want to print the credit correctly.
The terms, in full
Sending work means agreeing to these. They are deliberately short, and they are the whole agreement — there is nothing else to sign.
- You keep the copyright. All of it. Publishing here changes nothing about who owns the work.
- You grant Glyph the right to display it on this site, with your name and any credit line you ask for. That is the entire grant.
- The grant is non-exclusive. Publish the same piece anywhere else, before or after, without asking us. Simultaneous submissions are fine.
- It is revocable, no reason needed. Email and it comes down at the next deploy — usually the same day. You will not be asked to justify it.
- No money moves in either direction. Glyph does not pay for work and never charges a reading fee. If that changes, it changes for new submissions, not retroactively for yours.
- Nothing is licensed onward. Your work is not syndicated, sold, anthologised, or handed to anyone who asks — they get pointed at you. It is not used to train a machine-learning model, by us or by anyone we would give it to.
- Edits need your say-so. Obvious typos get fixed. Anything else — a title, a line break, a stanza gap — is asked about first and dropped if you say no.
- This is plain language, not a lawyer’s contract. It is written to be read rather than to be airtight. If a clause does not work for you, say which one and we will talk about it instead of you walking away.
How to send it
One email, no form, no account, no third-party submission portal taking a cut of your attention:
contact@datarail.org · subject line: Glyph submission
A person reads it. Expect a reply within a few weeks; if a month goes by, send a nudge — that is not rudeness, it is a lost email. A no is a no about fit, on one site, on one day, and nothing more than that.
Send in your listings
The calendar is built from what venues and series organisers send. Email your dates and an assistant drafts them into listings, code checks them against the calendar’s rules, and a person reads them before they go up.
Everything a listing needs, in whatever order suits you:
- What it is — a reading, open mic, workshop, launch or panel — and what it is called.
- When — the date and the start time. A series can be written once: “every Monday in October, 7pm”.
- Where — the venue.
- The link people should follow for details or tickets. Every listing links out, and your page is always the authority.
- The price, if there is one, and access — stairs, a lift, a step-free way in. Glyph never guesses at either, so if you leave them out they stay out.
- For workshops: the registration deadline, the number of sessions, and how many places there are.
What becomes public, and when. Proposed listings are reviewed in the open, on GitHub, where the calendar is built — so the listing itself is public from the moment it is proposed, before anyone has approved it. That is why only the listing goes there: the event’s details, as you would want them printed. Your email address never does, and neither does your message.
A room new to Glyph gets added by hand before its first listing goes up. And if you run a venue and want out, say so and your listings come down — no argument, no form, no follow-up asking if you are sure.