First, the names of some amateur poetry publishers are quite similar to the Library of Congress. This misconception occurs for a number of reasons.

The Library of Congress has become a locus of questions about vanity press poetry publishers-receiving upwards of two-hundred inquiries per year-because many people mistakenly believe that the Library itself publishes and sells these anthologies. These for-profit publishers, which have been extremely active since the 1980s, accept nearly every poem submitted to their contests for publication, and make money by encouraging winning poets to purchase copies of the anthologies in which their poems appear. In almost every instance, the poems in question were published by an amateur, or vanity press, poetry publisher. By far the most common question I receive, however, comes from people trying to find poems that they wrote, submitted to a poetry contest, and subsequently had published in a poetry anthology. The questions I receive tend to cluster around two or three major categories, such as how to find literary criticism on a novel and how to locate the full text of a poem without knowing its title and author. One of my jobs as a digital reference specialist is to answer questions submitted through the Poetry and Literature Center’s Ask a Librarian form. Poetry Contests, the National Library of Poetry, and Amateur Poetry Anthologies

Embrace the Dawn by Kathleen Morgan