Poetry About Murder: Submissions Call

Below are details of an upcoming anthology of poems about murder being put together by Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter, a professor of mine at Queens College/CUNY:

Dear Poet,

Harold Schechter and I have decided to team up again to collect work for another anthology. This time, we are looking for poems about murder--either specifically, as in treating of a particular murder, or more generally, as in murder as a subject of contemplation and philosophical, moral, or psychological speculation. As long as murder is the focus of the poem, not part of a tangential reference or merely mentioned in the title.

We’ve just begun assembling a working table of contents. So far, we have Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” Thomas Hood’s “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” various nineteenth-century murder ballads, plus poems by Mark Doty, Cornelius Eady, Frank Bidart, Ai, and Thom Gunn.

If you’ve written on the subject yourself, we’d love to see your poem(s). We also welcome all suggestions, particularly if you know of any such poems in the public domain. Please: no war poems, poems about accidents, or poems about dying or death, only poems directly about murder. The subject should be specific to that alone. We’d prefer previously unpublished poems, but will consider any poems to which you retain rights. Payment in author’s copy.

Deadline is September 30th. We would prefer to receive submissions by email to kurtbrown1@mac.com as a Word attachment. If you must send them via regular mail, please address them to:

Kurt Brown
1534 Castillo Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

If you have any questions about this project, don’t hesitate to contact me at the email address above. Of course, submitting poems to us is no guarantee that they’ll be published. But we will look seriously at all submissions.