The Colosseum: Colosseum Books Author Manuscripts

Overview
Colosseum Books operates as a distinct imprint within Franciscan University Press, with a catalogue deliberately limited to one or two titles per year. This scarcity is not incidental but curatorial: the press prioritizes poetry and criticism that demonstrate sustained engagement with prosody, aesthetic form, and the Western literary tradition, including its Catholic lineage. The result is a list shaped less by market cycles than by an editorial commitment to intellectual and spiritual seriousness. While most titles are commissioned directly by the editor, the press maintains an annual window for unsolicited manuscripts, open from July through August. Submissions received outside this period are not reviewed. Poetry manuscripts should normally run between 50 and 150 pages; volumes of criticism typically begin at 100 pages and address the craft of poetry or its relation to enduring human questions. There is no submission fee. The press does not position itself as a general trade publisher or a venue for contemporary experimentation divorced from tradition. Instead, it seeks work that is at once contemporary and conversant with the broader Western and Catholic literary inheritance—poetry that knows its meters and its antecedents, criticism that treats form as inseparable from meaning. For the right manuscript, the reward is a place in a small, carefully tended catalogue rather than a rapid publication cycle.