These are the writers' guidelines for Cornerstone magazine. We appreciate your interest and hope you will find these guidelines helpful.

THIS TOPS THE LIST
The most important thing you can do: READ THE MAGAZINE. More articles are rejected for not being familiar with Cornerstone than for any other reason. By reading back issues (which you can now do for free online), you can familiarize yourself with our outlook on poetry. Think about what sort of viewpoint we're likely to publish, and what sort of "voice" we're likely to use.

STYLE
Your punctuation, capitalization, and general writing style should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. Our main deviation from this is that we capitalize personal pronouns relating to the Persons of the Trinity (He, Him, His). For note references and documentation, we use endnotes (never footnotes) which follow the humanities style used in CMOS section 15.

The only category of article Cornerstone accepts is poetry.

POETRY
We accept a variety of poetic styles (e.g, avant-garde, free verse, haiku, light verse), but if it has a "churchy", sing-song rhythm or form, it's not for Cornerstone. We usually print 5 or 6 poems per issue, and we pay $10.00 for a poem of one to fifteen lines, and $25.00 per poem for 16 or more lines. We are looking for good use of imagery, words that elicit a sensory response in the reader, and poems that stay with you after the magazine is tossed under the couch.

Lots of freelance poems get published in Cornerstone. For typical examples, see "If It Was Now" by Judith L. Roth (issue 116), "Praying into the Mystery" by Fredrick Zydek (issue 113), and "Wine into Water" by Joy Sayer (issue 110).

ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS
The following statement reverses our previous policy on electronic or e-mail submissions.

We would like all submissions to be sent via e-mail if at all possible. Submissions on paper are no longer desired (unless you live in a country without access to e-mail).

Text with minimal formatting needs should be sent as plain ASCII in the body of the message. Italics on/off can be indicated with underline characters _like so_, and boldface on/off can be indicated *like so*. Please leave a blank line between paragraphs if sending text as plain ASCII in the body of an e-mail message.

Text with advanced formatting needs, such as poetry with structural indentation and line breaks, should be sent as a binary file attachment with the e-mail message. Preferred document formats are RTF (rich text format), Microsoft Word 97, Word Perfect, Lotus Word Pro, Ami Pro, WordStar, or (in a pinch) HTML.

E-mail submissions should be sent to the following addresses:

• poetry@cornerstonemag.com

If you send a file-attachment, please tell us in the message body which word processor, version number, and operating system was used to produce it.

DO NOT EXPECT REJECTION NOTICES
Due to the large volume of material we receive, we will only be able to respond to works we wish to publish. However, please rest assured that all material sent to Cornerstone is read and considered.

Simultaneous submissions and previously published works are acceptable for submission.

Publication of your work in Cornerstone automatically shall entitle us to republish your work on our website at http://www.cornerstonemag.com/, unless special arrangements are made with the editor in chief.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jon Trott
Editor in chief