JLRB Press is an independent, small-run imprint that specializes in poetry, with a strong emphasis on queer, transgender, women’s, neurodivergent, and emerging voices. ¶
Part-time job applications are currently open. View open positions
Submissions are currently closed. To stay up to date with our open submission periods, subscribe to our newsletter.
ENOUGH! We have watched in horror as our quiblings, sisters, and brothers in the U.S. have been stopped, arrested, beaten, injured, and murdered by ICE agents.
On , we invite all Canadian poets, authors, artists, publishers, and human beings to join the National Shutdown in solidarity.
Today’s the day! 🎉 We’re proud to announce the softcover release of Becoming: An Anthology of What-If Poems about Women and Womanhood! 💃
We’re certain that our authors can’t wait for you to read their work! 📖 (Oh, and as for the title of this post…we’ve decided to ever-so-slightly subvert Mercury’s words to Æneas and reclaim that antique slur. We, women, reserve the right to grow and change forever—our bodies, our thoughts, our works, our minds. 😌✨)
We stand in solidarity with our American friends, colleagues, and loved ones to condemn the senseless murder of Renee Good by ICE. Beyond the labels of wife, mother, lesbian, and poet, she was a vibrant human being and the extinguishing of a life is the extinguishing of a world.
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR RENEE GOOD.
We’re proud to announce the release of Granville: 20th Anniversary Edition, Expanded & Revised by Lucía M. Polis, available in English worldwide from Amazon and Barnes & Noble in softcover. 📖🙌
We’d also like to give heartfelt thanks to everyone who has attended Lucía’s virtual launch for the book. 😌🩷
On August 30, 2025, join us for a virtual book launch of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Granville—Lucía M. Polis will read poems from her book, tell stories about the original collection’s composition and its later reimagining, and answer audience questions. 🛣📚️
✨ All attendees will have a chance win a free copy of the book and other goodies! ✨
On July 14, 2025, our Chief Editor Lucía M. Polis gave the talk titled “History, Memory, Trauma: Poetry and Publishing as Mutable Historiography of Self” as part of Eavesdrop Magazine’s Vancouver Island Artist Summer Talk Series. Alas, due to a technical issue, the talk’s audio did not record Lucía’s audio correctly. The following re-recording presents the full contents of her original talk (without the Q&A afterwards).
We hope this talk both teaches and delights! ⏳🧠🩸
Today, we open the next submission period for our second anthology, Becoming: An Anthology of What-If Poems about Women and Womanhood. This collection borrows a timeless (albeit, over time, problematized) reminder from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
One is not born a woman: one becomes it. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female assumes within society.
Our submission form asks poets a series of curious and provocative what-if questions, such as: What would a world without women look like? Or a world of total gender fluidity? What might femininity mean one hundred years from today?
We invite the poems that you write in response to these questions to take a fierce, fearless look at the most challenging and least frequently discussed subjects—from intersectional and trans-inclusive feminism, to womanness (as gender identity) and femininity (as gender expression), to power differentials and the male gaze, and to emerging identities that we’ve only just begun to discover.
Why We Set This Boundary: We reserve the right to protect our peace. In part because our prior emphasis on the writings of queer, cisgender men has led to critical imbalances in representation—which we’re actively working to correct—and in part because of persistent patterns of entitled refusal to rework manuscripts substantially, the exploitation of our unpaid labour, and the pervasive harm to our readers that we’ve had to weed out painstakingly, as of August 1, 2025, JLRB Press no longer accepts submissions from cisgender men. If this feels like a radical decision, we invite you to sit with the question why.