Reading Series Submissions
Pool Party is a reading series and online lit mag seeking fiction, poetry, and personal essays that evoke the nostalgia of 70s horror and gothic fiction—pool parties gone wrong; suburban drugs, sex, and murder; and the weird shit kids do when their parents aren’t looking. Pool Party is the place to come if you want to feel a lot nostalgic, a little bit bad, and a fair amount of heart-wrenching passion and regret. We would love to keep you in mind for our next IRL reading. Please send reading submissions which fit upcoming themes to [email protected] after reading the details below.
Looking for our literary journal submissions page? Click here.
Guidelines
Please send all submissions to [email protected] with a subject line that follows this format: Reading Submission [date]. In other words, Reading Submission 2.14.2025. Please confirm your submission has met the below requirements before sending.
- Ensure your submission fits into an upcoming theme. Near future themes include:
- August: “Luxury Time.” Think suburban cookouts, group family vacations, or the subversion of these–i.e. a strange relationship to luxury time, fantasies of luxury time, resentment about lack of time.
- Nov./Dec. (month/date tbd): “Minimum Wage: Tales of First Jobs.”
- Excerpts from longer works and standalone pieces are all welcome!
- In your email, please include a casual cover letter and short bio so we can get to know you.
- Attach something you’ve written that’s in the vein of our theme. It doesn’t have to be the exact piece(s) you would read at an event, but should reflect a similar tone, style, and topic.
- Written submissions should be no more than 2500 words, and should be submitted as a Word Doc/Pages email attachment.
- Submissions should be double-spaced, and your header info. should include your name, address, email, phone number, word count, and title.
- Submissions should include page numbers.
- Do not submit anything generated by A.I. Although we know that writers and artists are doing interesting work that is in dialogue with A.I., we choose not to contribute to the ecologically disastrous impacts caused by utilizing this technology. We also feel strongly against publishing work containing crowdsourced language and phrases created by A.I. tools that have been ‘trained’ by subsuming existing authors’ and artists’ work without consent, credit, or compensation.
- If you’re a storyteller rather than a writer, please attach a video or audio recording of work like what you would be reading for us. And since you won’t be attaching a doc, please do include all the contact information mentioned above in the body of your email.
We aim to respond to submissions within a month but response times can vary. Please do not follow up unless 90 days have passed since you submitted.
Questions? Email [email protected]
