We here at Augury want to apologize for a glitch in our Submittable notifications. When we initially announced you’re the most beautiful thing that happened by Arisa White as our poetry selection for 2016, along with a list of finalists who will be featured in the coming weeks on our blog, we believed each author who had submitted work and was not selected received a Submittable email notifying them of our decision and thanking them for entrusting us with their work. However, it has recently come to our attention that some authors who submitted their work did not receive our email and that their manuscripts continued to be listed as In-Progress on Submittable. When we remedied that situation by closing this summer’s poetry submissions category, other authors received a second decline notice. Neither of these situations are acceptable: lack of notification or multiple notifications.
We want to make it clear that our selection process prizes each author first and foremost. We pride ourselves on being a press who works closely with authors in all facets, as we are authors ourselves and understand the work and (often times) frustration which comes with putting your writing out into the world and seeing it declined. We posted our poetry selection and finalists believing that everyone had been notified beforehand. We are sincerely apologetic both to those who learned of their rejection via our post as well as to those who had received our original notification and so experienced the follow up notification as an unnecessary second rejection. Glitches happen, but the publication process is so emotionally fraught anyway that we are sorry tech issues on our end may have added frustration or gloom to any author’s day.
Please stay tuned to our blog for updates about our prose selection and finalists in November.