Summer 2025
Submission Period: April 1-May 15, 2025
Guest Editor: Lora Keller
Let’s play! Our guest editor invites you to submit poems about sports–basketball, baseball, football, volleyball, dodgeball, golf, pool, bowling, handball, tennis, any game played with a ball–whether you are a spectator or a player. Bramble is open to all forms, styles, and aesthetics of poetry. Please send no more than three poems, with the text of the poems pasted in an email to bramble@wfop.org (a PDF attachment is welcome for poems with unique formatting). Please also send a 50-word bio, photograph and mailing address.
Lora Keller
Lora Keller was voted most improved on her hometown’s first official girls’ basketball team after Title IX legislation passed. She still can’t shoot or dribble very well. Instead, she writes poems about basketball as well as fashion, mental health, nature, and sometimes body parts. Her poems have won numerous awards and are widely published including in McNeese Review, Reed, Sport Literate, The Midwest Quarterly, as well as Bramble. She is developing a collection of basketball poems titled Maybe Now Basketball. Early in her career, she was a journalist, scriptwriter, public relations executive, educator and small business owner in Milwaukee, New York City and Kansas City.
Submission Guidelines
We welcome unsolicited submissions from Wisconsin poets* & WFOP members. Please send one submission of 1-3 poems (of any length and style) to bramble@wfop.org. Put your last name and "Bramble Submission" in the subject line. In the body of the email please include a cover letter with mailing address, poet pic, a 50 word bio, and your poems. Please do not submit poems as a separate attachment unless your poem requires special formatting (PDF preferred).
No previously published poems.
Please make only one submission to Bramble per issue.
If your work was accepted in the last issue of Bramble, we ask that you wait out a cycle before you submit again.
Contributing authors and artists will receive one contributor's copy of the print issue.
If you are interested in providing original artwork for the cover, please query at bramble@wfop.org.
We publish triannual issues. Winter/Spring, Summer and Fall.
Rights revert to poets/contributors immediately after publication. If poems are reprinted later (in a collection or anthology), we appreciate an acknowledgements credit.
Submission Schedule
*Bramble seeks to celebrate Wisconsin poets & poetry, as part of the mission of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. For our purposes, this includes poets who live & write (a substantial portion of the year) in Wisconsin, as well as students studying in Wisconsin. If we cannot determine from your bio or mailing address whether this is you – we won’t be able to consider your submission.
WFOP is an inclusive and accommodating group. Benefits of membership are listed here. If you have any questions or concerns about membership please contact our membership chair at wfopmembership@gmail.com. Membership is calendar year based from January to December. Join here.
If you would like to receive email notifications from Bramble about Bramble news or new Bramble releases please sign-up below. The magazine will issue quarterly by season: winter, spring, summer and fall.
Bramble on.
