2025-2026 Houston Poetry Recovery Project

Call for Submissions

Deadline: Friday, February 6, 2026.

1–3 poems

 

The newspaper archive is filled with curiosities, pigeonholes, mythologies of everyday life, and mysteries. Headlines, ads, classifieds, font types, illustrations, and photos can all inspire new creative conversations.

 

The Houston Poetry Recovery Project is seeking work from Houston or gulf coast based artists who take local, historic newspapers as their source.

 

Poems can be erasures, found poems, or something totally new. All forms are encouraged as long as a creative link is made between the newspaper source and the new work.

 

Examples of poetry that incorporates and responds to newspaper or historical archives include The Age of Phillis, by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers; Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon; or “Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith, which uses the Declaration of Independence as its source material.

 

Newspaper sources can be any Houston or Gulf Coast area publication, in any language.

Poems may respond to any newspaper text published in the 19th or 20th century.

 

Accepted authors will receive a modest honorarium and be invited to read their poem(s) as part of a live event in April 2026.

 

After the live reading, authors of accepted submissions will be invited to be published in a collection by Bundle Press.

To submit, please send 1–3 poems attached as separate PDFs without identifying information to contact@bundlepress.org with the subject line “HPRP Submission.” Please include a 1–3 sentence author bio in the body of the email.

The deadline to submit is Friday, February 6, 2026.

 

How to access historic newspaper archives

 

Houston Public Library (with library card):

  • Access newspaper archives here.
  • Scroll to “Houston Chronicle Historical Archive 1901-2017”; “Houston Post Historical Archive (1880-1995)”; “NewspaperArchive (for remote users)” which includes searchable newspaper images from historic small papers in Texas and the southern U.S; or “19th Century U.S. Newspapers Digital Archive” which includes the Galveston Daily News.
  • Enter library card info when prompted.

 

University of North Texas Libraries, Portal to Texas History:

 

Library of Congress:

 

This project is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

 

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