For the duration of the month of March, the poetry department is temporarily closing to new submissions. The submission portal will reopen on April 1. If you’ve been sending us poetry for many years, you already know it’s ordinary for us to take a month off every year or two, often in December, so we can get caught up on a backlog or focus on another project or have a vacation. This is that.

It’s usually something we note on our poetry submissions guidelines page, and maybe in a tweet, but given the unexpected submissions closure at Clarkesworld this week (read more in this detailed post by Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke) and since it falls on the same day our Wuxia/Xianxia special issue ends its limited submissions window and since we’re reopening on April Fools’ Day, it seemed prudent to say explicitly that it’s a coincidence and not a pattern.

So far, Strange Horizons has not seen any big spikes in chatbot-generated submissions. It’s also true that in the time period discussed in Neil’s post, we have not been open to general fiction submissions; we’ve been looking at poetry and at a limited-demographic submissions call. (We do sometimes publish poems that use automation or prediction or collage or statistical noise, which is a longstanding tradition in poetry going back at least as far as Dada. We are less interested in predictive-text essays or short stories.) We’re keeping an eye on it and will let you know if our experience changes.