The sonnets selected will be those rated highest by the panelists who read them. Typically, each sonnet will be read by three people.
David R, what we say on the site is this:
We prefer sonnets that have never been published elsewhere, online or in print. (We do not consider something “published” if it has been posted only on a forum or workshop site where the work is not archived.)
So... we’d rather have new work, but previously published sonnets are not absolutely ruled out. That opening was left mainly in case we had trouble getting fourteen good enough sonnets within the timeframe. If that did happen, we might, as a fallback, want to approach the authors of sonnets we’ve seen elsewhere and liked exceedingly well, asking if we could republish them. But I don’t think it will come to that. I’m confident that all the sonneteers out there won’t let it.
I’m actually more concerned that we might end up with
too many good ones. Suppose we had to change the name to “nineteen by nineteen” and ask the authors to convert their sonnets into villanelles.
