Guidelines for Editors of Anthologies

The University of Iowa Press has published dozens of anthologies of creative writing on topics ranging from death and dying to boomer babies to housework to patriotism to zeppelins. At some point early in discussions with a potential editor, the phrase "labor of love" comes up. The truth is that you're not going to make any money or advance your professional career and you will spend an enormous amount of time organizing and collating your material. But still there is something satisfying about creating a collection that adds up to more than the sum of its parts, about articulating an idea that is dear to you, about carrying this idea out until it becomes a solid book.

Editing an anthology involves balancing a series of contradictions. Your subject needs to be niche driven enough that you can reach your readers but not so specialized that your audience is too limited. The collection needs to be thematically unified so that we can describe it to potential buyers in one sentence but diverse enough to form a stimulating collection. We're looking for anthologists who can provide an optimistic, compassionate, and meaningful viewpoint to a well-defined audience, for anthologies that can go into high school classrooms, such as Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School, or into parenting groups, such as Birth: A Literary Companion, or into medical schools, such as Medical Readers' Theater: A Guide and Scripts, or into civic organizations or religious study groups or graduate Shakespeare courses or writing workshops.

Consider Your Audience

While gathering works, you should remember that the collection needs to connect in diverse ways to diverse readers. Do you have a balance of male and female authors that is appropriate to your subject? A balance of racial and ethnic perspectives? Of different schools of writing? Of both established and younger writers? You need to be in touch with lots of writers and lots of styles and lots of perspectives, but in the end you need to rely on your own good judgment about what constitutes fine writing and what fits your original vision. You must be willing to be ruthless when it comes to tossing out poems or stories or essays that don't really fit into your collection, even if these pieces are quite lovely individually.

As you gather your anthology's poems or stories, keep your introduction in mind. In one sentence, what is the primary theme? Does each piece clearly connect to that theme? Can it be referred to in the introduction in a way that supports the theme?

In general, we prefer a strictly alphabetical arrangement of works by author's last namerather than trying to force them into subject categories. Categories that are perfectly clear to your editorial vision can be less than clear to your readers. Allowing readers to make their own connections—guided by your introduction—works well.

Manufacturing costs are directly related to book prices; thus we urge editors to strive for a short, tightly edited collection. Less is really more when it comes to selecting only those pieces that truly reflect the editorial vision. An anthology more than 200 pages long—containing more than 100 poems or 15 stories—will be too expensive and cumbersome for readers.

Readers and teachers appreciate biographical information, so please prepare short paragraphs about each contributor's publications, awards, and teaching experience. Each note should contain approximately the same amount and type of information as all the rest. Please ask your contributors to review this information before you prepare your final manuscript.

Obtaining Permissions

You are responsible for obtaining and paying for all necessary permissions from authors and publishers to reprint the pieces in your collection. Gathering permissions can take several months and can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. Generally, the more famous the author, the more money involved and the more red tape involved. It is often necessary to obtain permission from both the author and the original publisher of the work. Start the permissions process early, as soon as we send you a contract for publication, since all the poems or stories included in your final manuscript must have the necessary written permissions. E-mail permissions are acceptable. Please refer to our permissions guidelines for more information.

Beyond permissions, your most challenging task will involve scanning or rekeying or otherwise transforming the pieces you have selected into a consistently formatted manuscript.Unless each piece's dedication, epigraph, subheads, etc., are a significant part of the work itself, we prefer to treat all these items consistently so that your anthology can be appreciated as a unified book.For poetry, reproducing each poem's style—unusually long lines, justified lines, deep indents—can be challenging for you and for us; see the attached samples for our preferred format. Being able to refer to the original formatting is very helpful, so we require photocopies of the original works—as published or, in the case of new pieces, as they were originally sent to you. Please be aware, however, that is sometimes impossible to reproduce each poem's vagaries exactly.

Submitting Your Manuscript

Before you submit your final manuscript, please send any rekeyed pieces to their authors for review. This precludes having to ask them to review their works in proof and streamlines the publication of your book.

Depending upon how your book is organized, we will ask you to provide an author, title, and/or first line index at page proof stage.

For table of contents, poetry, contributors, permissions, and indexformats, see the attached samples.

Please keep track of the names, addresses, and e-mail addresses of your contributors. We will ask you to give us a list just before publication so that we can send them complimentary copies.

Submission Checklist

Your manuscript should include

____title page
____dedication and epigraph, if you want them
____table of contents, without page numbers
____foreword (if another person is writing one)
____acknowledgments (can be combined with your introduction)
____introduction
____the rekeyed pieces themselves, in alphabetical order
____contributors notes, organized by author's last name
____permissions information, organized by author's last name
____photocopies of the pieces as originally published or as sent to you

Please refer to our Author Checklist for more detailed information.

Sample Contents Page

Contents

Foreword by Jane Smith
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Harvey Crandon, from Cape of Good Hope
Ann Dickson, To a Friend Who Made Her Way
Willa Everysong, [untitled]
David Moolten, Ode for Orville and Wilbur Wright
Simone K. Ortega, A New Orleans Poem: Song for the Jazz City
Karen Carver Wright, Poetry Is for Everybody
Contributors Notes
Permissions
Index to Titles

Sample Poem

[Note: The labels are for information only. Please do not label each part in your manuscript.]

Cries of the Newsboy [title]

News in the World [subtitle]

Edith M. Thomas [poet]

To poetry anthologists everywhere [dedication]

I hear thee, trumpeter—listening, alert, I catch thy notes.

—Walt Whitman [epigraph]

1. City Ways [section title]

Cruel the roar of the city ways,

Where life on a myriad errands whirled;

But suddenly up from the jarring maze,

Like a rocket thrown high, went a ringing cry:

“New-Sunny-World! New-Sunny-World!”

[When a poem runs onto another page, insert STANZA BREAK or NO STANZA BREAK for clarity]

There wasn’t a glimpse of the sun anywhere;

            Up through the streets the sea fog curled;

Grim was the light and leaden the air;

            The world looked old, yet that voice rang bold:

“New-Sunny-World! New-Sunny-World!”

The brisk little crier I could not see,

            But I treasured the rocket cry he hurled,

And thought, “This is wonderful news to me!

            Heigh-ho! Is it true? Is it so to you?

                        A New Sunny World?”

Sample Contributors Notes

Kim Addonizio's most recent book, Tell Me, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2000. She is also the author of The Philosopher's Club and the coauthor, with Dorianne Laux, of The Poet's Companion. Her many awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Julia Alvarez's novels include In the Time of the Butterflies, Yo! and In the Name of Salomé. Something to Declare, a book of essays, was published in 1998.

Dorothy Barresi is the author of Rouge Pulp and All of the Above, which won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of English at California State University, Northridge.

Sample Permissions

Hart Crane: Selection from “Cape Hatteras” from Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon. Copyright © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Babette Deutsch: “The Flight” and “Going Far Away” copyright © 1927 by the author. Originally appeared in The Spirit of St. Louis, ed. Charles Vale, published by W. W. Norton in 1928. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Sample Index

The Afterlife, 152 [poem starting with the word “The”]
Against the Madness of Crowds, 23
Anne, 162
Any Holy City, 46
Arsonist and Fireman, 47
An Asian Dying, 125 [poem starting with “A” or “An”]
at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 131 [poem with lowercased title]
The Ballad of Ravensbrück, 120
Baptism, 22
Blessing for Malcolm Lowry, 30
A Body of Water, 6
. . . . . . . . .
throwing out the flowers, 25
Tract, 134
The 29th Month, 79 [poem alphabetized by how the number would be spelled out]
[untitled], 90, 124 [untitled poems]
Upon My Word, 88

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