About

Students send up to six poems, or flash fiction or a short story of up to 1,000 words, as one Word or PDF attachment to the press’s high school address, stating their age and school in the email. Simultaneous submissions are not accepted, and the editors prefer to hear from students themselves rather than from teachers. No contests are held, no submission fee is listed, and replies can take up to six months.

The magazine has appeared since 1966 and has reached issue 119, and the press has collected the high school section in four anthologies. A placement is a publication credit in a small-press literary magazine, not an award, and the press gives no acceptance rate. The press’s own history names poets who first appeared in the section, among them Meghan O’Rourke.

Hanging Loose is the right venue for a high school poet or fiction writer who wants editors at a long-running independent press to read the work and, if it is chosen, print it in a long-running literary journal.