Tonight we sent out the first round of acceptances for the 2019 Poetry Marathon! We’re very excited. Over two hundred people will be accepted in the first round.

Instead of offering a last minute secondary sign up period this marathon, we are extending the sign up period to the 15th of June. So the last day to sign up is the 15th of June!

You can sign up here for the full marathon (24 poems in 24 hours, one poem per hour) and the half marathon (12 poems in 12 hours, one poem per hour). All poems must be posted on the blog. This year for the first time the poems can be made private, so that the only people who see your work are other marathoners.

The Poetry Marathon will start at 9 AM ET on June 22cd. Half marathoners can start at 9 AM or 9 PM on June the 22cd.

If you complete the marathon or half marathon you are eligible to submit to The 2019 Poetry Marathon Anthology edited by Jennifer Faylor.

The details of the anthology will be released after the Marathon. To learn more about The Poetry Marathon as a whole go here.

Sign up is now open for the 2019 Poetry Marathon! You can sign up here.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 22nd, and will go till 9 AM ET on Sunday the 23rd of June. Those who are interested in doing a half marathon start at 9 AM ET on June 22nd and go till 9 PM on the 22nd. Or they will start at 9 PM ET on the 22cd and continue to 9 AM on the 23rd.

The goal of the poetry marathon is to write and post one poem an hour for 24 hours. Half marathoners post a poem per hour for a 12 hour period.

This is an international event with participants from all around the globe. Generally 500 people attempt the marathon. You do not have to be a poet to participate.

To learn more go here. To sign up go here.

If you are interested in participating please sign up by the 12th of June! We will get back to applicants on a rolling basis.

Sign up starts on June Third! Jacob and I are going to be particularly busy this year, as our daughter celebrates her first birthday on the second of June, but we are excited!

The prompts are all ready to go and have been scheduled. This year some hours will have more than one prompt so that people have more options. Thank you to everyone who contributed a prompt.

Another big shift this year is that the posts in the marathon will be private by default. If you participate you can see others posts, if you don’t participate, you won’t.

However, if you do want to share your work with friends you are free to do so on your own blogs are social media. But the overwhelming feeling of the group was that private posts would be preferred.

The other big piece of news is that we have an editor for our Poetry Anthology this year. I’m really excited about this as it’s the first time I am not going to be the editor.

Jennifer Faylor is a poet and literary editor raised in NYC where she earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Currently she lives in Washington State and is working on her first short story collection. Her website is jenniferfaylor.com.

She has volunteered and participated in a number of previous marathons!

The Poetry Marathon itself will be on June 22cd but in order to participate you have to apply for free between the 3rd-12th of June.

Applying takes minutes, but we found that it helps in terms of making marathoners more committed and prepared for the event itself.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon will be like the 2017 Poetry Marathon in most ways. There will be two half marathon options. We will have volunteer help.

The one difference will be the anthology. In the past I (Caitlin Jans) have done 90% of the work on the anthology with Jacob Jans finalizing the work. This year our hope is to raise enough money to pay an editor to put together the anthology.

The major motivator behind this is that fact that I just don’t have the time to edit the anthology between our kids, my own writing, facilitating the poetry marathon, and my job.

We have never fund-raised for the marathon before and have paid all expenses ourselves, and we will continue to do so, outside of the editor for the anthology.

We are going to start reaching out to possible editors (who will have to be past marathon participants) and figuring out how we will raise the money for the anthology.

The amount of money we will be looking to raise will be around 500 dollars.

If we don’t receive the money to pay the anthology editor in all likelihood we will not go forward with publishing the anthology this year. However we have

If you have any questions or ideas to help fund-raise please send an email to poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

If you are not familiar with the anthology you can view the 2017 one here.

We are always grateful for your support and participation.

The goal of the Poetry Marathon is to write one poem every hour, for twenty-four hours, straight. There is also a half marathon option, to write one poem every hour for twelve hours straight.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 22nd and goes till 9 AM on Sunday the 23rd of June. Those who are interested in doing a half marathon can either start at 9 AM EST on the 22nd of June and go till 9 PM. Or they can start at 9 PM EST on the 22nd and go till 9 AM on the 23rd of June. The second option might work better for poets living outside of North America.

If you want to figure out what time the Poetry Marathon will be for your time zone, this time zone converter can be very helpful.

Sign up will start in late May/early June. You must sign up in advance in order to participate.

Learn more at our website here

A while back we warned everyone that the future of The Poetry Marathon was uncertain, that we were not sure how we were going to proceed next year, if we were going to not do one in 2018 or if someone else would take on the bulk of the work with Jacob and I providing support and experience.

We had a lot of talented volunteers that wanted to help and take over the work. Many of them seemed fully capable and they may well have done a lot better job than us, but it became clear that narrowing down the candidates and training them would take a lot of work in and of itself.

So the long and the short of it is this – there will be no 2018 Poetry Marathon, and we know this makes many of you sad, and it also makes us sad. But we also know how much support we have from everyone going forward – and that is our plan – to go forward.

The reason we know for sure we will not be able to host or train anyone to take over for us in 2018 is a very exciting one, at least in our minds. Our second child is due May 28th, 2018.To have the marathon take place before than seems insane, and afterwards even more so.

In 2019 (barring the end of the world or other un-forseen developments) there will be a Poetry Marathon, that we run and that looks a lot like the ones that proceeded it.

The only thing we know will change is the anthology. Caitlin will still design the cover but we are going to look for a different editor, someone from within the Poetry Marathon group, someone who has participated in at least one Marathon before, and we will pay that editor.

We will be able to afford to pay this editor because the marathon anthology will be happening dependent on donations. We will set up a gofundme (or some such fundraising site) and set the goal at 500 dollars. That money will go to the editor. We hope everyone will help promote the page and that the anthology will happen because of it. There will still be no fees attached to the marathon. But this seemed like the only way to make the anthology sustainable.

The following year we will try and have someone work on the marathon 50/50 with us, and then that person (or persons, but no more than two) may take over from us, with the mandate to never charge for the marathon, and always keep it international.

Even though there won’t be an official marathon this year, but if you want to run or participate in an unofficial one, you have permission to use the blog, just drop us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com. We won’t be offering much in the way of technical support/ feedback, but we should be able to help with the basics.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment here or send us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com

Submissions to the 2017 Poetry Marathon Anthology are open now and will stay open through the 15th!

Read our guidelines carefully before submissions.

All submissions must include two poems, no more, no less.

All submissions must be made via our email address (poets@thepoetrymarathon.com).

The subject line of all emails must be Poetry Submission. Poems must be included in the body of the email.

All poems submitted must be written during the 2017 Poetry marathon. All poems should be completely edited and contain no major grammatical errors. Revisions are allowed and encouraged. Please check your punctuation before submitting. All poems should be single spaced. Any extra space will probably be interpreted as a stanza break.

The first word of every line should not have a capitalization unless it is intentional! Word has an auto caps feature that you can turn off by following the instructions below.

You must indicate which hour each poem was written in. Only poets who completed the whole or half marathon will be eligible to submit. Also Indicate your location. Please include a link to your page on the Poetry Marathon.

Thank you for following the guidelines! I know they might seem a little strict but they make it possible to put together an anthology in a few months, while having a child and a job that pays the bills.

There is no guarantee that by submitting your poem will be selected, although the goal is to include one poem by everyone who submits.

Digital copies will be made available for free to any contributor. Print copies will be available for a reasonable price (last year it was 8 dollars to purchase a copy) and any money that is made from selling the anthology will go towards covering the cost of the marathon.

Want to know what the 2016 Poetry Marathon Anthology was like? Pick up your copy here.

Many of the posts and comments I read refer to next year’s Poetry Marathon. Jacob and I even use this phrase when talking to each other, and then we catch ourselves.

The poetry marathon has been going for five good years now. We love participating in the challenge, we love having this amazing supportive creative community, but also it is a lot of work.

When we started it we were a young married couple. We might have thought we had a lot of responsibilities at the time, but frankly we did not. We had plentiful free time for the most part. Each year though we accumulated more responsibilities – a growing business,  a dog, more community involvement, a house, also there were always health problems, but they seemed manageable, temporary even.

Then two years ago we had a wonderful little one. This year we faced a health crisis. I don’t know what else to call it without revealing more about it. It is something we will always have to deal with, even though hopefully it will be better in the future.

But still we pushed forward thinking this would be the last year maybe. And the way it currently is it is unsustainable. Unless our life was to get dramatically easier in the next year it just won’t be possible to put the kind of time in we do every year.

So here are our options going forward as we see it.

1. We find one (or possibly two) person who can take on up to 75% of the work. This person would be in charge of things like writing emails, answering questions, doing the occasional blog post, etc. We would still cover the costs of hosting the website and help where we could in terms of technology, image making, and prompts. We would also provide a clear outline of what needed to be done. If this happened the agreement would just be to try it for one year and see how it goes.
2. We take a year off and hope that enough improves to attempt hosting the following year. We did this once before because we were between homes in the summer. This was the year between the first and second marathon.
3. People take it into there own hands and have their own marathons linking to our website for idea credit.

2 & 3 of course could happen together. What do you think? We really are a community and we really want to hear feedback and opinions.

I just spent the morning compiling the list of winners of the poetry marathon and half marathon. I’ve linked to the all of the participants pages below. Note, there may be a few names missing –– if you’re not on the list and should be, please let us know! (poets@thepoetrymarathon.com)

––Jacob