The 2015 Poetry Marathon will start on June 13th at 9am EST. This is a fact, but now we have another date and a lot of other information to reveal.

Participants can sign up for the half marathon or the full marathon like last year. Sign up should start within the next two weeks.

Sign up will happen through a short application process. Potential Marathoners will have to answer a very small number of questions and provide contact info. We will accept the bulk of applications, those rejected will be encouraged to re-submit. This process is just designed to eliminate anyone who is not seriously about completing the marathon or half marathon.

We will cap the number of participants at 500. We may not reach that number, but if we do, we will not accept additional participants for logistical reasons.

We will accept applications on a rolling basis, trying to respond to everyone within three days of their information being submitted.

At least a week before the Marathon everyone will be given access to a Facebook group (all previous participants are welcome to use last year’s group) and to a WordPress account on our main website. They will be encouraged to introduce themselves.

This year you can choose to be part of a group or groups on the Poetry Marathon website. There will be a Half Marathon group, a Full Marathon group, a few geographically oriented groups and you can even create your own group that can be public or private. The group page will make it easier to follow just a certain group of poets through the marathon. This is something we are experimenting with, so we are still trying to sort out the kinks here.

We are also very grateful to already have three volunteers to help us with the groups and with dispensing information. We are also looking for additional volunteers. Volunteers might find themselves in charge of a Facebook group, helping respond to applications, or addressing questions. If you are interested in volunteering, please email us at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

Regretfully we are not going to have an anthology this year. The main issue is that there will be too many participants for the anthology to include all participants.  We are also expecting our first child not long after the Marathon, so we will be rather busy. This makes the anthology logistically problematic. It may return next year but in a different, more curated form. We might run a featured poem (from the poetry marathon) program on the website for all of July.

We look forward to joining you in this year’s Poetry Marathon!