Lines + Stars

04/04/2026

Our summer 2026 issue's theme will be 💦 wash 💦.

Send us your work about cleaning (the need for, act of, or aftermath), cleanliness (of self, others, objects, times, places, thoughts), ablution, purification, and the impact of washing.

Deadline: July 1, 2026.

More here:
https://linesandstars.submittable.com/submit

__________

"At the rest stop on the way to Mississippi
We found the butterfly mired in the oil slick;
its wings thick and blunted. One of us, tender in the fingertips,
smoothed with a tissue the oil
that came off only a little;
the oil-smeared wings like lips colored with lipstick
blotted before a kiss.

So delicate the cleansing of the wings I thought the color soft as
watercolors
would wash off under the method of her mercy for something so slight
and graceful, injured, beyond the love of travelers."

—Angela Jackson, from "The Love of Travelers"

03/03/2026

Excited to join this jaunty collective on Saturday! Come party, everyone! ✨

18/02/2026

This will be grand! So happy to be taking part.

Thank you for the invitation, The Hopkins Review!

AWP CONFERENCE WRAP PARTY:

Read the Room:
Celebrating Literary Baltimore

Saturday, March 7, 2026
5:30 pm - 10:30 pm


Food • Drinks • Music • Silent Auction

5:30 pm - 7:30 pm:
Reception ft. Silent Auction + + Drinks + Short Readings from

7:30 pm - 10:30 pm: PARTY ft. DJ Heavenly C. + Gary 108, DJ, Esq.


Hosted and Sponsored by:
Lines + Stars Hot_L Reading Series

13/02/2026

We're delighted to announce that Baltimore-based poet Barbara Westwood Diehl's sumptuous debut collection "Foolish" will be published this spring as last year's winner of the annual Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series.

Many, many congratulations to you, Barbara!

_____________

The saleslady in Nordstrom says,
You need more reds, perhaps
a blouse to bring out
the blood in your cheeks
or coax the roses along your fence
to bloom again. It is fall now,
not too late for red silk
that licks the skin
like that campfire at the cabin
where you stayed with your husband
before the children. Perhaps a scarf,
she says, and ribbons silk
through department store air,
a billow of red smoke
wisping into ash and settling.
Now, her white hands are
petaling red onto your collarbone.
Knot it just so, she says, as if
it were possible to sew roses,
to stitch the blood with silk.

— "More Reds," from the collection

____________

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of the Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry has appeared and is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, New World Writing Quarterly, Tiny Molecules, Sky Island Journal, and Cleaver.

✨

26/12/2025

Just under the new year's wire (as it goes!) slides our winter 2025 issue of Lines + Stars. The contributors to "Signal" listen to and interpret messages from nighttime bar-goers, from music festival memories, from silence, and from a variety of fish. Have a read!

www.linesandstars.com

14/12/2025

Extended ✨poetry chapbook submission deadline!💫

Submit to our annual Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series -- for those living in the Mid-Atlantic who have not yet published a poetry collection -- by December 31.
Details here: https://tinyurl.com/yc58n4zm

30/09/2025

We've extended the submission deadline for our Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series to October 31st! See below and follow our Submittable link!

https://linesandstars.submittable.com/submit/331605/extended-deadline-ls-press-2025-mid-atlantic-chapbook-series

It's that time of year again! The submission period for our annual Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series -- which publishes the debut collection of a mid-Atlantic poet -- is now open! Send us your work by September 30th.

Details here: https://tinyurl.com/5h9txbvd

06/08/2025

It's that time of year again! The submission period for our annual Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series -- which publishes the debut collection of a mid-Atlantic poet -- is now open! Send us your work by September 30th.

Details here: https://tinyurl.com/5h9txbvd

10/07/2025

We're thrilled to announce the publication of "The Mortician's Son," Maryland-based poet Kevin Roy’s debut chapbook and winner of our 2024 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Contest. This collection is an at times gentle, at times incising absorption into what we inherit, siphon off, transmit, and transmute.

Congratulations, Kevin!✨Bravo!

To order: https://linesandstars.com/ls-press/

“In The Mortician’s Son, Kevin Roy lays out the stations of the body — the body as a whole world and the world itself as a body. He shows that to exist is to be perpetually altered at a cellular level, blasted, and transformed, even in death. From the chemicals a mortician pumps into a co**se to a radiation bath below Chernobyl and the aftermath of cancer, these haunting lines shift mortality from a distant phenomenon to a process lodged deep beneath the reader’s skin. Roy offers a hymnal for the drowned and those touched by fire, a piano’s wild melody transmitted through the vibration of clenched teeth.”
— Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound, One Long Night, and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

*****

Kevin Roy is a professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. For twenty years, he has taught, mentored, conducted community-based life history interviews, and published more than fifty articles and book chapters. He has been writing poetry for even longer, published in Kestrel, The Shore, The Broadkill Review, Slant, Summerset Review (nominated for Best of the Net), and Rogue Agent (nominated for The Pushcart Prize).

08/07/2025

Our summer/fall 2025 issue will focus on signals.

Where do you encounter signals? Is a signal the same as a sign? Which do you heed and which do you ignore? Do they recur? What are the images, instances, energies, and messages that guide your decision-making?

Deadline: September 8, 2025.

Submit poetry and short prose via our Submittable page: https://linesandstars.submittable.com/submit

🌐🛑✅🚺🅿️⚠️❌〰️☣️

22/06/2025

Join us at Atomic Books on July 12th! 🐙