Serving House Books — Blue

Overview
Serving House Books has issued a dual call organized around a single chromatic constraint: the color blue. The first is a free submission call for stories or poems intended for a print anthology; the second is a reading-fee call for full-length collections—poetry books of 75 pages or more, short fiction collections of 90 pages or more, excluding front and back matter—in which blue must be featured in the work and/or title. The window runs from September 1 to November 1, with a final deadline of November 2, 2026. There is no fee for the anthology call; the collection call requires a $10 reading fee, and no refunds are issued. The press's stated curatorial method is blind reading by five readers across five different states. Manuscripts must carry no identifying information, and the work is judged solely on the work. This is a structural commitment to anonymity and geographic dispersal, not a gesture. The press accepts simultaneous submissions but requires immediate withdrawal if a manuscript is accepted elsewhere; only unpublished works are eligible, though sections previously published as a chapbook or as individual poems or stories are acceptable provided the manuscript as a whole remains unpublished. What the press offers is consideration by a distributed jury under blind conditions, with the color blue functioning as the organizing principle rather than a decorative theme. The constraint is the curatorial vision: it asks writers to interrogate blue as image, mood, formal device, or title, and to sustain that interrogation across a book-length manuscript. The anthology call extends the same premise to individual stories and poems at no cost.