For The Record
2027 Poetry Contest & Anthology
Northern INK is now accepting submissions for For the Record, our 2027 poetry anthology and contest.
This year's collection is built around two broad themes:
AGING
TRUE STORIES
Interpret them widely.
We are interested in memory, family, time, bodies, change, history, what happened, what almost happened, what you understood only years later, and the strange distance between the life we lived and the story we eventually learned to tell about it.
The rules are intentionally loose. This is poetry. We don't want to tell you what your poem should look like before you've written it.
We do want one thing very clearly:
Write it yourself.
We are not accepting AI-generated poetry.
This particular book is asking for something only you possess: your memory, your language, your mistakes, your humour, your grief, your history, your imagination, your version of what happened.
Use yourself. Use your life.
Give us something that belongs to you.
Submit Your Work
[SUBMISSION LINK — COMING SOON]
What We're Looking For
Most poems selected for For the Record will be short to medium in length.
Long poems are absolutely welcome, and there is no strict length limit. But this is a physical anthology, which means poems requiring several pages will naturally be selected in smaller numbers.
Beyond that, the door is fairly wide open.
Free verse. Formal poetry. Narrative work. Experimental work. Frenglish. Funny poems. Difficult poems. Quiet poems. Poems that don't behave particularly well.
If the poem belongs in this book, we want to read it.
What Selected Writers Receive
Every poem selected for For the Record will be published in Northern INK's 2027 anthology.
But this year, we want the anthology to become something more than a place where a poem appears once.
At Northern INK, we've always thought of ourselves as a platform that helps writers move forward. Sometimes that has meant workshops, feedback, community, publication, or simply helping someone gain the confidence to call themselves a writer.
This year, we want to make that promise more concrete.
We want our annual anthology to become a place writers can build from.
Three Northern INK Signature Releases
From the writers who submit to For the Record, three poets will be selected for a Northern INK Signature Release, to be published in 2027 or beyond.
Each Signature Release will be a professionally edited and published chapbook-sized collection of the writer's own work.
Northern INK's editor will work directly with each selected writer through the editing, development, formatting and publication process. The publication-side costs of producing the book will be covered.
The author will retain:
100% of the rights to their work
ownership and control of the publishing account for their book
100% of all profits from book sales, at launch and afterward
Northern INK will take no royalty and no percentage of future sales from these Signature Releases.
The books will belong to the writers who wrote them.
The goal is simple: three people should be able to leave this contest with more than a winning poem. They should leave with the opportunity to build something larger from their work.
Final length and contents of each Signature Release will be developed with the selected writer.
Submission Fee
$5 per submission
Each submission may contain up to three poems.
You are welcome to submit more than once. Each additional group of up to three poems counts as a separate submission.
Deadline
March 31, 2027
Submissions received after the deadline will not be considered for this edition.
About Northern INK
Our first anthology was built with our writing community and spent nearly two months at #1 in Canadian Poetry.
That first book showed us what an anthology could do when writers treated it as something larger than a collection of individual pieces.
For For the Record, we've pushed that idea much further.
Before opening submissions, we've already spent months developing the themes, writing, workshopping, researching, planning and asking what would make the next anthology stronger.
More thought, more work and more writing have gone into this project before the open call than we put into our first anthology from beginning to end.
Now we want to open the doors wider.
We want For the Record to reach beyond our own writing community and beyond our Canadian friends and neighbours.
More importantly, we want the Northern INK anthology to become a real annual platform for writers: somewhere strong work can be published, noticed, and perhaps become the beginning of whatever comes next.
We made the first anthology with our community.
For the Record is where we invite you in.