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For Teachers - How to Submit Your Classroom Entries Online in 10 Easy Steps!

Texas 4th-12th graders are invited to participate in Letters About Literature, an annual writing competition administered by the Texas Center for the Book. Students read a book or poem and write a letter to an author—living or dead—explaining how his or her work changed their view of themselves or the world.

For teachers who would like to enter their students' submissions via the online portal, please follow these instructions:

1. Application information: The online submission portal (https://xtexasstatelibrary.submittable.com/submit) will open on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. If you have not entered before, you will need to create a free Submittable account in order to apply. The deadline is 6 p.m. Central time on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026.
    
2. If you don’t have a Submittable account, create a free account by filling out the Create your account form. Click the Create Account and Continue button to continue with the Letters About Literature submission process.
    
3. Read the full submission instructions, including the 2025-2026 Letters about Literature Texas official rules, before you submit your classroom entries.
    
4. Enter your school address and work contact information. Please enter your school name without any abbreviations in “Address Line 1.” Click Save Address and Continue.
    
5. On the submission page, under “Who is submitting this form?”, choose “a teacher.”
    
6. For each student, complete all required fields for submission, upload or type the student’s letter entry and click Submit. You will need to complete this process for each student’s letter.
    
7. If any of your students are younger than the age of 13 before December 15, 2025, you will be prompted to pause, save your progress and upload a scanned pdf or image of a hand-signed parent permission form. This form is required for all students younger than 13. We recommend collecting signed permission forms prior to beginning the submission process.
    
8. After a successful submission, you will be redirected to the beginning of the form. To submit another entry, simply scroll down and click Save Address and Continue. Please do not edit the address fields—these are saved to your account and will be autocompleted for every entry. Complete the rest of the form for each student’s entry.
    
9. You will receive an email confirmation for each classroom entry you submit. You may view and track the status of all your completed and in progress submissions under “My Submissions.” If necessary, select a submission from this menu and click Edit to request permission to update an entry.
    
10. Congratulations! You have successfully submitted your classroom letters to the Letters About Literature Texas contest.

Alternate classroom submission process: Teachers with older students and a computer lab may prefer to have each student create their own Submittable account and submit their entry themselves. When completing the online entry form, these students should select that “a student” is completing the form with “teacher assistance” and enter their school name and your email address in the fields that appear.

Important note: We do not recommend that teachers create an account and have all their students log in and submit using the teacher’s account. In order to submit entries at the same time, students must be logged in to separate accounts. If you submit all the entries with the same account, you must complete the form and submit an entry before beginning to submit the next entry.