WE ARE SORRY TO SAY THAT WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS.

Antrim House was founded in 2001 to publish the work of emerging as well as established poets. Writers who have produced a body of work sufficient to create a chapbook or full-length collection are invited to submit 3 pages of poetry electronically to antrimhousebooks@gmail.com. You may also send your work with an e-mail address or stamped & self-addressed envelope to Robert McQuilkin, Antrim House, 400 Seabury Dr., Apt 5196, Bloomfield, CT 06002. Please understand that we are highly selective and ask for full manuscripts from only a small number of those who submit samples. Whatever our decision, you will receive a response as quickly as possible.

Should your MS. be accepted for publication, the publisher will offer editorial advice and work with you collaboratively to perfect your book. He will be sure it is a thing of beauty, paying close attention to every aspect of its design and text, conferring with you often concerning both. He will also be happy to assist in the selection of those whose endorsements appear on the back cover. The end result is always far more satisfying than when authors are kept at arm’s length by their publishers, which is generally the case.

The works published by Antrim House are exceptional in both content and design. When publishing poetry collections, we strive to create books that are more than mere compilations of good poetry: we want them to create a sense of unity and natural sequence, each poem leading seamlessly into the next. At the same time, we want individual poems to present themselves in the most attractive way possible, both textually and graphically. Accordingly, we give them breathing room and pride of place, placing them carefully on their pages and selecting fonts that show them to their best advantage. In addition, we choose paper that is unusually pleasing to the eye and the hand; and our covers have been widely praised for the artful way they evoke what lies within. In short, our books are works of art. They are as important to us as to their authors, and we will never let them go out of print.

We put our authors in direct touch with a print-on-demand press (Ingram Spark) that not only prints and binds our books but also offers advertising and wide distribution of the books it prints, making them available to on-line bookstores such as Amazon as well as "brick-and-mortar" bookstores, libraries, universities, museums, and the like. The marketing services of Antrim House itself include 1) posting titles in Books in Print and FaceBook; 2) sending books to The Library of Congress; 3) featuring our books on the Antrim House website, presenting biographical and critical commentary, pictures of poet and book cover, sample poems, and "seminar room" entries (new work, notes, images, reviews, study guides, etc.); 4) supplying a list of contests and awards, as well as a list of poetry venues; and 5) helping authors submit books for national awards and doing so ourselves when only a publisher can submit;

Our authors are asked to do as much as possible to arrange their readings/book-signings, workshops, and other sorts of marketing and promotion. However, the publisher provides considerable support by calling upon his knowledge of the literary community in Connecticut and beyond. He has been an active member of that community for many years and for nine years directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which has attracted unusually large audiences. His credits include many awards from Connecticut and national arts organizations, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Connecticut Center for the Book and its annual award for the year's most outstanding collection of poetry. He was the Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015-2018.

Antrim House stresses the importance of oral presentation, encouraging our authors to perform their work as widely as possible. We hope to cultivate wider appreciation of poetry as a vibrant literary form that too often goes unnoticed in the midst of pop culture’s noise-making. While we have no bias toward formal or informal, traditional or innovative work, we do insist that Antrim House writing be both comprehensible and resonant, rewarding multiple readings by revealing itself gradually but also avoiding the sort of inscrutability too much in vogue. When the poetry we publish has a political slant, we like it to abide by Emily Dickinson’s dictum: “Tell all the Truth but tell It slant.” That is, we favor the work of a writer like Martín Espada, whose political poetry is imagistic rather than abstract. If we publish poetry that might be termed “confessional,” we insist that it be universal and not purely personal. Finally, we believe that high seriousness and high humor can cohabit. We side with Shakespeare against Racine.

At Antrim House, we know that when poetry speaks simply and plainly, while at the same time retaining a sense of mystery and offering multiple levels of meaning, it can be as popular an art form in this country as it is in others and as it once was in the United States.