Welcome to Bainbridge Island Press!
We are a traditional independent publisher of poetry. While we especially love to showcase the incredible talent of Bainbridge Island, WA and the entire Olympic Peninsula of Western Washington, we publish incredible authors like you from all around this big beautiful globe of ours.
Learn more about us and view (or even buy!) our titles on BainbridgeIsland.press
We have a passion for undiscovered poets seeking to publish their first book. Whether this is your first or your fourteenth book, we're excited to engage with you.
Manuscripts should be approx 80-120 pages in length. You can submit your manuscripts in Word or PDF format. No reading fees are required.
Accepted submissions will be notified by email and offered a publishing contract. All published authors are compensated.
At BIP we believe chapbooks have become undervalued and become little more than short poetry books. We want to bring them back in the spirit of "zine culture" as short, fast, cheap works that allow work of any time to get into the hands of readers quickly, whether its an early seed of what will become a full poetry collection in the future or simply poems you don't feel belong elsewhere.
Submissions should be 20-40 pages in length in MS Word format.
Accepted submissions will be not be compensated. No reading fees are required.
Bainbridge Island Press is seeking poems for As of Fire, an invited chapbook gathering around the themes of Pentecost, understood not as doctrine, but as event: the moment wind enters a room, voice finds its body, a stranger becomes witness, fire takes the shape of a tongue. We believe in poetry as Aristotle understood catharsis, not the release of emotion, but its container: the form that holds what would otherwise overwhelm, and in holding it, transforms both the poem and the reader. As of Fire is a chapbook for that kind of fire, the kind that is controlled and necessary and purifying.
We are interested in poems that reckon with voice and utterance: the first word, the word withheld, the word that arrives in the wrong language or the only true one. We want transformation and urgency, fire as fact rather than metaphor, the body in the middle of becoming. We want breath and the physical world, wind, threshold, the body as instrument. We want community and witness, gathering, rupture, the sudden knowledge that you are not alone.
We welcome work that is devotional, skeptical, secular, mythic, domestic, furious, or tender. What we are after is the charge of the event, not its theology. Pentecost as origin story for poetry itself: the rush of a sound, the appearance of flame, everyone speaking at once and somehow understood.
Contributors may submit up to 5 poems. Previously published work is welcome with acknowledgments. Please send through Submittable.
Questions? Reach out. We are glad you are here.
Bainbridge Island Press publishes work that takes language seriously.