We read each submission at least three times, but often a piece receives more reads, sometimes exceeding eight different reads. We read submissions so many times in part because we want to be careful and fair to each work and in part because Copper Nickel is a teaching journal, which is to say that, through and during the review process, we are always training Creative Writing students to be better readers and better editors. The amount of time and concentration required to do both means that, with our outgoing policy of accepting work year-round, some work takes several months to get through the review process—at times longer than we editors would be willing to wait if we were the writers.

Therefore, starting this fall, we will accept unsolicited work in two "windows," one opening on August 15th and closing on October 15th of each year and the other opening on January 31st and closing March 31st. Our hope is that these windows will enable us to better organize our reading and evaluation so that every submission will receive a timely reply.

COIN will feature some of our favorites from back issues, along with interviews, conversations, commentary—including book reviews—and, in the coming months, audio and video goodies as well.

We'll be adding elements to COIN at least once a month, but probably more regularly, and twice a year we'll collect all the coinage in a pretty PDF format that will showcase the layout of Copper Nickel we're so proud of.

What are we thinking? you might ask.

Here's our official launch statement:

When the students at the University of Colorado Denver met in the Fall of 2001 to discuss the founding of a literary journal, the idea of the internet journal was fresh. You could have done anything, it seemed—and you could have done it on the cheap. But the students who would go on to establish Copper Nickel in the Spring of 2003 were students of books, first and foremost. They loved (and, one expects, still love) the afternoon in a used bookstore that would turn up early paperbacks of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Wise Blood or abandoned dreadnaughts, Ulysses and Infinite Jest, even, at times, a hardback whose latter pages hadn't been cut. They loved books, and they wanted to make books.

The venture of Copper Nickel has, then, always been to make a book—something to hold in the hand, something with a binding, with a spine, where the connection of one text to another has always been visible—even when every other year has brought another gust of paeans, telling us the book was dying, that there was no way to found a new title, a new journal, that reading was changing. We have worked through these storms to create 15 issues—with a 16th soon to follow.

Since the heft of the book has been a primary goal, we've always said about the website, about the presentation of content on the web, that's something we'll get to later, when we have more people, when web fonts get better, when...

So, when people have asked for some kind of sample of what we publish, when writers have asked Where can we read the sorts of things you like?, we've always said Buy a copy. It's cheap.

It still is cheap to buy a copy of an issue, even cheaper to buy a subscription, and we'd still encourage you to subscribe to keep our enterprise going—because when you buy a journal, you're not buying the paper and ink, you're supporting the work.

We're launching Coin as a companion to Copper Nickel, which we hope will remain an effort in print for years to come. Here, you will find samples of work we have published in Copper Nickel, and maybe these will make you into one of our readers. These samples will be accompanied by interviews, conversations, book-reviews, and audio and video presentations—documents that don't fit well into the format we've developed for Copper Nickel over the last eight years—which will be the main metal of this venture.

This material will be presented here in a traditional web format. Soon we will add to this a rich-PDF presentation that will flip like a book, however virtual. And when the time is right we'll add a tablet-native version.

Coin will be, like Copper Nickel, a work-in-progress.

We hope you'll stick with us as we move forward.

We need to keep the contest entries separate from the normal submission stream so we can keep track of payments and communicate with entrants more effectively. Sorry for an confusion or inconvenience.

The appropriate link is now visible on the guidelines page.

All submissions must be made electronically.

Like last year, we're offering a $1000 prize to one winner in each genre. Entrants get a one-year subscription (2 issues) with their $15 entry fee.

This year's judges are Daniel Alarcon, in fiction, and Kevin Prufer, in poetry.

Entries will be accepted through midnight on March 31, 2011. Finalists will be announced by May 15th. Winners will be announced on or before August 15th.

Full guidelines available at http://www.copper-nickel.org/contest/.