When Write Out Loud relaunched our Instagram account back in November, we introduced a rolling open call for submissions of poetry excerpts. These are shared to our public feed, and so far, we’ve had submissions from around the globe.

We welcome poetry excerpts on any theme and in any style. Our only rule is the obvious exclusion of anything that could potentially be portrayed as being harmful or offensive towards certain groups or individuals.

The best way to submit your excerpts is to copy the text which you’d like to be featured – formatted however you wish – and then paste it into a Direct Message (DM) to our account. We’ll then enter your text into one of our uniform templates so that it sits nicely on our feed.

Please note that submissions will be processed in order of when they’re received, and depending on how many we have at once, there may be a wait time of around 4-6 weeks. We’ll do our best to process them as quickly as possible.

You’re welcome to submit as many times as you like, but each new submission will send you to the back of the queue in our inbox, so we strongly recommend that you submit one at a time. Also, you can submit several poetry excerpts for consideration at once, but it’s better if you just choose one.

To be clear, this is an unpaid opportunity which is simply designed to create a virtual community of global poets on Instagram. Think of it as an ongoing ‘virtual open mic’ if that helps! Also, we may occasionally share some of the excerpts on our Twitter feed – please let us know if you’d rather we didn’t do that.

Huge thanks to everybody that’s submitted so far. We can’t wait to see what else arrives in our inbox as the account continues to grow!

See three examples of poem excerpts on Instagram