Made by a small studio.
TextShelf is a shelf for the work you collect, review, and decide on. It's for teams that want a simple tool and a clear record of who read what and what they said.
It started with one playwriting contest.
TextShelf began in 2018 as a project to help the organizers of an annual playwriting contest manage hundreds of submissions from writers around the world. It has since grown to fit other teams that collect, review, and decide on the work that crosses their desk.
Between 2018 and 2025 it ran submissions for that contest and others like it, saving organizers hundreds of hours of administrative work. Thousands of writers, reviewers, and organizers have trusted it with their documents. It now has shelves built for literary contests, grant programs, academic review, and portfolios.
TextShelf LLC is a word-and-data development studio near Washington, DC. It makes software for people who collect and review documents.
Wm Talcott
Public infrastructure and tooling for social research. Editor of Hypermedia Systems (Carson Gross, Adam Stepinski, Deniz Aksimsek).
Wm holds a Ph.D. in sociology and has spent more than twenty years building data tools for social research, including field data collection at NeighborWorks America. Much of that work has been for organizations that run review processes, grant programs, and shared projects.
TextShelf grew out of that work, starting with a playwriting contest in 2018.
MCP integrations, multilingual programming tools (lokascript.org), and hypermedia interfaces for LLM agents. GitHub →
Private shelves
Each shelf has its own members, and each member's role decides what they can see.
File collection
Entries arrive through a link you share and are stored with the shelf.
Review coordination
Assign submissions to reviewers and collect structured feedback.
Team communication
Organizers can send readers a reminder, and anyone on a shelf can write to its organizers.
Selection tools
Filter and rank entries by their review scores, then make your selections.
Portfolio showcase
Display work publicly with customizable portfolio pages.
Three things we hold to.
Your data stays yours
We don't sell your data, show you ads, or track you across other sites. The privacy policy has the details.
Kept small
We build what review teams use and leave the rest out. That keeps TextShelf quick to learn and its prices low.
Open source support
TextShelf is built with open source software. We dedicate at least 5% of our time or profit to supporting open source projects and communities.