Do you have a longform creative nonfiction piece looking for a home? In a literary moment when flash and shorter essays reign, it can be difficult to place longer work. My own frustration in finding a venue for a personal essay that is nearly 8,000 words led me to compile a list for myself, and I’m happy to share it with you below. Clicking on the titles will lead you directly to submissions pages. Best of luck in finding the perfect outlet for your work. Write on! ~ Erin Wood
Notes: If you see any mistakes, updates, or venues I’ve left out, feel free to send a message through Et Alia’s “Connect” tab. Click HERE and scroll to the “Email Us” button. “About us” sections are copied and pasted directly from the magazines’ sites.
AGNI
Wordcount: No hard-and-fast length limit though space is at a premium and length sometimes affects decisions.
Payment: $20 per printed (or printed-out) page for accepted prose.
Submissions Period: September 1 - May 31.
About: AGNI is a literary magazine housed at Boston University and known “among readers around the world,” as the writers group PEN put it, “for publishing important new writers early in their careers, many of them translated into English for the first time.”
The print magazine appears twice yearly, in late April and late October. A very small portion of each is reprinted on this site, but you’ll also find a trove of writing published exclusively online, including categories like reviews and interviews that we tend not to feature in “the print.”
Most of the writing we publish comes to us unsolicited. Our authors and translators include Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, Stephen Dixon, Donald Quist, Joan Wickersham, Michael Mejia, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Rita Dove, Victoria Lancelotta, Jo Ann Beard, Peter Balakian, Noah Warren, Jenny Xie, Kaveh Akbar, Magdalena Tulli, Marilyn Hacker, Dorthe Nors, Bruce Smith, Cyrus Cassells, Melanie Rae Thon, Susan Bernofsky, Jill McDonough, Robert Long Foreman, Paisley Rekdal, Patrick Modiano, Lia Purpura, Anna Journey, and Maggie Smith.
Cherishing our differences as much as the verities we share, we are drawn to writers of every creed, race, orientation, gender, ethnicity, culture, national origin, age, and experience. We’re especially proud when we can lay claim to being the first to publish a new writer or translator.
The Adroit Journal
Wordcount: Up to 9,000 words
Payment: $50
Submissions Period: Sign up for updates on window. Currently open September 15-November 1.
About: Featured in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes Anthology, Poetry Daily, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Teen Vogue, PBS NewsHour, and NPR, The Adroit Journal has featured the voices of Fatimah Asghar, NoViolet Bulawayo, K-Ming Chang, Franny Choi, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Sarah Kay, Dorianne Laux, Lydia Millet, D. A. Powell, Diane Seuss, Danez Smith, Arthur Sze, Ned Vizzini, Ocean Vuong, and more than one thousand more.
The Arkansas International
Wordcount: Up to 8,000 words
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: General submissions December 15-March 15. Themed Issue June 15-August 15
About: The Arkansas International features work— much of it in translation—from international and U.S. artists, building bridges between readers worldwide.
Alaska Quarterly Review
Wordcount: “Generally not exceeding 70 pages/18,000 words.”
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: 2024 period not yet announced. April 29 to May 14, 2023
About: Alaska Quarterly Review is one of America’s premier literary magazines and a source of powerful, new voices. It is published twice a year in both print and digital editions and maintains partnerships with the Center for the Narrative and Lyric Arts and the Anchorage Museum. Founded in 1980 by Ronald Spatz and James Jacob Liszka, its mission is to discover, nurture and present eclectic and innovative literary works by a diverse range of new and emerging writers, and the non-commercial work of established writers, in print and digital formats, and in online and live public forums. We use the power of literary art to promote empathy, truth, and learning in service of positive change. Our features empower artists and writers to develop broader questions and difficult conversations including works focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, the environment, and social justice.
Barrelhouse
Wordcount: Up to 8,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Sign up for newsletter to be notified when submissions window opens.
About: Barrelhouse is produced by writers for readers who are looking for quality writing with an edge and a sense of humor. Barrelhouse bridges the gap between serious art and pop culture. Barrelhouse is a biannual print journal featuring fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays about music, art, and the detritus of popular culture.
Barrelhouse is a web site that regularly posts new short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, and other literary things. Barrelhouse is a small press that puts out roughly two books a year.
Bennington Review
Wordcount: Up to 30 pages
Payment: $250 for prose over six typeset pages, two copies of the issue in which the piece is published, and a copy of the subsequent issue.
Submissions Period: November 15, 2023 - March 8, 2024.
About: Bennington Review is a national biannual print journal of innovative, intelligent, and moving poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and film writing, housed at Bennington College.
We intend to reinforce the value of the bound print journal as an intimate, curated cultural space in which a reader can encounter and experience new work with a degree of immersion not wholly possible through other media. We hope to bring together writing that is as playful as it is probing, that simultaneously makes lasting intellectual and emotional connections with a reader. Bennington Review aims to contribute distinctive style and substance to the national literary conversation through publishing sharp, unexpected, original poetry and prose from a geographically broad and culturally rich spectrum of prominent, up-and-coming, and new voices.
The magazine was originally founded in 1966 by Laurence J. Hyman, the son of Stanley Edgar Hyman and Shirley Jackson. The first iteration of the magazine focused on publishing work by distinguished faculty and alumni — Bernard Malamud, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Burke, but gradually more and more work came from outside the college community, and the magazine increasingly received national attention. In 1978, Bennington Review was relaunched as a highly visible national journal. Under editors Robert Boyers and later Nicholas Delbanco, Bennington Review became a testing ground for contemporary arts and letters, publishing work by such established figures as John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Dillard, and John Ashbery, and by emerging writers like David Remnick and Louis Menand.
Black Warrior Review
Wordcount: Up to 7,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: December 1 - March 1 and June 1 - September 1.
About: Established in 1974 by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, Black Warrior Review is named for the river that borders the campus of The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The city, the river, and the magazine all derive their names from the 16th-century Indigenous leader Tuskaloosa (also spelled “Tushkalusa”), whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—tasca, meaning “warriors,” and lusa, meaning “black.” In 1540, Tuskaloosa battled the Spanish colonizer Hernando de Soto at Mabila, a fortified settlement perhaps in the vicinity of present-day Selma. Tuskaloosa was likely among the thousands who perished in the resistance effort, which is thought to have stopped the advance of de Soto’s campaign.
BWR publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and art twice a year. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners alongside emerging writers.
NOTE: A shout out to woman maker of Arkansas Lisa Krannichfeld, featured in Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives by Erin Wood, whose art is featured on the cover of Black Warrior Review’s Spring/Summer 2018 Issue 44.2.
BOULEVARD MAGAZINE
Wordcount: Up to 8,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: November 1 to May 1
About: Now available in print and online, Boulevard is a biannual literary magazine publishing contemporary fiction, essays, interviews, and poetry. Based in St. Louis, Missouri. Read internationally. Established in 1985.
The Carolina Quarterly
Wordcount: Up to 25 double-spaced, typed pages
Payment: $200
Submissions Period: Year round
About: The Carolina Quarterly has been publishing established and emergent writers for 65 years. Recent issues have featured the works of Lauri Anderson, James Gordon Bennett, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Sean Bishop, Nicole Terez Dutton, Aaron Gwyn, K.A. Hays, Caitlin Horrocks, Stuart Nadler, Ben Purkert, Valerie Sayers, Ken Taylor, Matthew Volmer, G.C. Waldrep, Jerald Walker, and more. Pieces published in The Carolina Quarterly have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best of the South, Poetry Daily, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prizes, and Best American Short Stories.
THE COMMON
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: $200
Submissions Period: General submissions December 15-March 15. Themed Issue June 15-August 15
About: The Common is a literary organization whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place.
Based at Amherst College, we aim to serve as a vibrant common space for the global exchange of ideas and experiences through three main areas of activity: publishing, public programming, and mentorship and education.
We publish works that embody particular times and places—literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here—and feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world. Publications include:
Two print issues per year; and
An open-access online platform updated weekly.
Copper Nickel
Wordcount: We do not have any length restrictions—but longer-than-normal pieces have to earn their space.
Payment: Copper Nickel pays $30 per printed page + two copies of the issue in which the author’s work appears + a one-year subscription. (Per-page payment could vary slightly from year to year based on funding. And international writers please note: all payments sent overseas are subject to a 30% tax, which is withheld on the front end. This is beyond our control.) We also award two $500 prizes per issue—the Editors’ Prizes in Poetry and Prose—for what we consider to be the most exciting work in each issue, as determined by a vote of our in-house editorial staff.
Submissions Period: August 15 - December 15, January 15 to March 1
About: Copper Nickel—the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver—was founded by poet Jake Adam York in 2002. When York died in 2012, the journal went on hiatus until its re-launch in 2014. Work published in Copper Nickel has been reprinted in the Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays anthology.
Ecotone
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Narrow submissions windows depending on season and category. See submissions page for details.
About: Ecotone’s mission is to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today. Founded in 2005 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Waccamaw, Catawba, and Cape Fear People, the award-winning magazine features writing and art that reimagine place. Our authors interpret this charge expansively. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground. The magazine explores the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, identities, and modes of thought.
Feminist Studies
Wordcount: Up to 5,500 for creative work (up to 10,500 for scholarly works)
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: Founded in 1972, Feminist Studies was the first scholarly journal in women’s studies and remains a flagship publication with a record of breaking new ground in the field. Whether drawing from the complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies raise social and political questions that intimately and significantly affect women and men around the world.
The journal publishes research and criticism that takes into account the intersections of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability. No other scholarly journal also features artistic, creative, and activist output on the same scale: each issue contains multi-page full color art spreads alongside art essays, poetry and fiction, photo essays, and commentaries on newsworthy topics.
Our issues typically contain thematic clusters of essays, creative work, and activist output, and our special issues (on topics such as Race and Transgender Studies, Women and Prison, Culture and History in the New South Africa, Chicana Studies, Conjugalities in South Asia, The Body and Healthcare) draw a wide readership.
The Florida Review
Wordcount: Up to 9,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: The Florida Review publishes work from around the world from emerging and established writers. We are not Florida-exclusive, though we embrace our state and its many communities. Our magazine is a home for the realistic and the weird alike. We love when the ordinary proves extraordinary or the wild is tamed. We love anything with sentences that sing. We love it all, and we’ve been loving good writing for over 50 years. The Florida Review has been in print since 1972, and in 2017, we added a new literary supplement, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, which features new work on a biweekly basis, along with author interviews, book reviews, and graphic narratives.
Fourth Genre
Wordcount: “We rarely publish anything over 6,000 words, but if it is longer, and really good, send it along.”
Payment: $50
Submissions Period: September 1-November 30
About: Published twice annually by the Michigan State University Press, Fourth Genre is a literary journal devoted to publishing notable, innovative work in creative nonfiction. Given the genre’s flexibility and expansiveness, we welcome a variety of works ranging from personal essays and memoirs to literary journalism and personal criticism. We showcase works that are lyrical, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as expository, analytical, exploratory, or whimsical. Our journal fosters a writer-to-reader conversation, one that explores the markers and boundaries of literary/creative nonfiction.
The Georgia Review
Wordcount: Up to 9,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: No unsolicited manuscripts May 15 – August 15
About: The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. While it began with a regional commitment, its scope has grown to include readers and writers throughout the U.S. and the world, who are brought together through the print journal as well as live programming. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.
Gulf Coast
Wordcount: Up to 7,000 for print (3,000 for online)
Payment: Print, $50 per .doc or PDF page
Submissions Period: September 1 - March 1
About: Begun by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate, Gulf Coast is the nationally-distributed journal housed within the University of Houston's English Department, home to one of the US's top ranked creative writing programs. The journal spent its nascent years (1982-1985) as Domestic Crude, a name that nodded to the major industry of the Houston area. It was a 64-page (magazine-formatted) student-run publication, with editorial advising coming from Mr. Lopate, who also contributed work to the first issues.
In 1986, the name Gulf Coast premiered. It stuck. After some experimenting, the journal found its dimensions and, eventually, its audience. The journal has since moved beyond the student body of the University of Houston and into the larger world. Our readership of the print journal currently exceeds 3,000, with more and more coming to our ever-expanding website. The print journal comes out each April and October.
The Gettysburg Review
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Published triannually, the Gettysburg Review considers unsolicited submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, and essay-reviews from September 1 through May 31.
About: The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country’s premier literary journals. Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall has appeared alongside that of emerging artists such as JM Holmes, Lydia Conklin, Jessica Hollander, Emily Nemens, Charles Yu, and Ashley Wurzbacher, who was recently named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.
More than one-hundred short stories, poems, and essays first published in the Gettysburg Review have been reprinted in the various prize anthologies—The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Poetry, Essays, Mystery Stories, Travel Writing, and Short Stories, New Stories from the South, as well as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards—or have reappeared in such esteemed publications as Harper’s. In addition, the Gettysburg Review’s editing, design, and graphics have earned numerous prizes, including a Best New Journal award and four Best Journal Design awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and a PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing.
The Journal
Wordcount: Up to 6,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: September 1st through December 1st, and from February 1st through May 1st.
About: The award-winning literary journal of The Ohio State University, The Journal contributes significantly toward the literary landscape of Ohio and the nation. The Journal seeks to identify and encourage emerging writers while also attracting the work of established writers to create a diverse and compelling magazine. The Journal has recently had poems reproduced in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. At The Journal, we aim to publish work that mirrors the complexity of the human experience.
The Kenyon Review
Wordcount: Up to 7,500
Payment: Pays $0.08 per published word of prose (minimum $80, maximum $450) and $0.16 per published word of poetry (minimum $40, maximum $200).
Submissions Period: September 1 – September 30
About: The Kenyon Review was the vision of poet Roberta Teale Swartz and her husband, Gordon Keith Chalmers, who became the thirteenth president of Kenyon College in 1937. Roberta Teale Swartz, a protege and friend of Robert Frost, published two acclaimed books of poetry. She was also instrumental in recruiting John Crowe Ransom to found a literary magazine in Gambier.
From the beginning, Swartz and Chalmers had grand ambitions for The Kenyon Review, and John Crowe Ransom’s stature in the literary world gave the magazine immediate clout. The inaugural issue, published in January 1939, included work by Delmore Schwartz, Ford Madox Ford, Randall Jerrell, and Robert Lowell (then a student at Kenyon, who had transferred from Harvard to study with Ransom). During Ransom’s 21-year tenure as editor, The Kenyon Review became one of the most influential literary magazines in the English-speaking world.
LitMag
Wordcount: Up to Print: 15,000 words. Online: 4,000 words.
Payment: LitMag Print: Upon acceptance, we pay $500 for full-length fiction or nonfiction (5,000+ words); $250 for fiction or nonfiction (2,500-4,999 words). LitMag Online: Upon acceptance, we pay $125.
Submissions Period: Nonfiction is open February 1 to May 31
About:
Looking for creative nonfiction; essays on literature, art, culture, and music; biography, memoir.
LitMag is a print journal of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, a home for award-winning, emerging and unknown writers. We seek work that moves and amazes us. We are drawn to big minds and large hearts. The annual print journal, which is published in the fall, is a beautiful object. Work from LitMag has been published in the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories.
Longreads
Wordcount: Essays and columns typically run between 2,000 and 6,000 words. Pieces may be longer or broken up into a series depending on the length and subject matter. Open to previously published pieces; see submissions page for details.
Payment: Personal essays should be submitted on spec, and we pay $500 per essay. We accept pitches for researched and reported essays, critical essays, and columns. Rates start at $500, with the fee varying depending on the level of reporting and research required, as well as the overall word count.
Submissions Period: Rolling.
About: Longreads, founded in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, is dedicated to helping people find and share the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, reading lists, interviews, and in-depth investigative reporting.
Longreads has been nominated for four National Magazine Awards, has won a Canadian National Magazine Award (Gold), and has been cited for digital excellence by the Online News Association and Peabody Awards. Our stories have won the Pushcart Prize and have been included or notably mentioned in the Best American and Year’s Best anthology series across essays, food, science, and sports. Our podcast series Bundyville, with Leah Sottile and Oregon Public Broadcasting, was named one of the best podcasts of 2018 and won an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2020.
Michigan Quarterly Review
Wordcount: Up to 7,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: General submissions for the print journal will be accepted in 2023 from January 1 to April 1 and August 1 to November 1. Average turnaround time is six months, but we may take longer and ask that you do not query us until a year has passed.
Prose submissions: Manuscripts should be double-spaced, right margins not justified; 1,500–7,000 words. All nonfiction submissions will be automatically considered for publication in MQR Online. All stories accepted for publication will be passed on to a judge as finalists for the $2000 Lawrence Prize. There is no additional fee for the prize beyond submission.
About: Michigan Quarterly Review, founded in 1962, is an interdisciplinary and international literary journal, combining distinctive voices in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as works in translation. The flagship literary journal of the University of Michigan, our magazine embraces creative urgency and cultural relevance, aiming to challenge conventions and address long-overdue conversations. As we continue to promote an expansive and inclusive vision, we seek work from established and emerging writers with diverse aesthetics and experiences.
Twice a year, we curate an array of perspectives on a single theme. Past special issues have included writing on Iran, the Global Water Crisis, and Persecution.
We have published prose by Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, Peter Ho Davies, Mary Gaitskill, Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Virgil Suárez, Corey Van Landingham, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hananah Zaheer, Francine Prose, Elizabeth Alexander, Juan Cole, Joan Silber, and James Wood.
The Missouri Review
Wordcount: No restrictions.
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: The Missouri Review maintains an “open submission” policy; we read year-round, sifting through approximately 12,000 submissions each year.
About: The Missouri Review, founded in 1978, is one of the most highly regarded literary magazines in the United States. For the past four decades we’ve upheld a reputation for finding and publishing the very best writers first. We are based at the University of Missouri and publish four issues each year. Each issue contains approximately five new stories, three new poetry features, and two essays, all selected from unsolicited submissions sent by writers throughout the world. The Missouri Review maintains an “open submission” policy; we read year-round, sifting through approximately 12,000 submissions each year. New, emerging, and midcareer writers whose work has been published in the Missouri Review have been anthologized over 100 times in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize, among others. We are also pleased to be the first to have published the fiction of many emerging writers, including Tim Loc, Jennie Lin, Susan Ford, and Amanda Baldeneaux. Writers whose work first appeared in the Missouri Review continue to win major prizes, including the National Book Award, the Yale Younger Poets Award, MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Additionally, we publish special features and interviews with a diverse body of writers. In our “History as Literature” series, we have published historical documents of literary significance or effect. The “Found Text” series features previously unpublished work by literary giants of the past, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouac, and William Faulkner.
North American Review
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: April 2 - November 30
About: Founded in Boston in 1815, the North American Review is the oldest and one of the most culturally significant literary magazines in the United States. Contributors include important nineteenth-century American writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and twentieth-century writers like William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Flannery O’Connor.
Iron Horse Review: “The Long Story” Contest
Wordcount: 20-40 pages
Payment: $1,000
Submissions Period: August 15 – October 15 (free sub 10/1)
About: One of our electronic issues celebrates a "long" manu-script. Originally, the IHLR Trifecta featured three winners, one in each genre, published electronically. Today, after Covid-19 budget cuts, The IHLR Long Story makes "room" for only one longer prose manuscript--an essay or story that print journals typically can't publish because of limited page space. We release the winning story / essay in a beautiful, full-color e-single, available for free download at ISSUU, just in time for summer when everyone is traveling and looking for something to read on their handheld devices. The winners originally received $250 each, but today, the one winner receives $1,000.
NOTE FROM ERIN: Scars: An Anthology contributor Jill Christman is a recent winner. You can read her Long Story, “Falling,” HERE.
Marrow Magazine
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: $0
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: Marrow is a literary magazine committed to publishing work that explores dark spaces. We’re interested in writing that uses compelling language and imagery to remind us what it means to be human, that makes wonderful the plain and strange the ordinary. We accept poetry, fiction, non-fiction, hybrid, and multimedia pieces.
Narrative Magazine
Wordcount: Up to 15,000
Payment: $250 to $500 for 500 to 2,000 word manuscripts. $500 to $1,000 for 2,000 to 15,000 word manuscripts.
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: Narrative is dedicated to advancing literature in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging reading across communities and generations, in schools, and around the globe. Our digital library of new literature by celebrated authors and by the best new and emerging writers is available for free.
Ploughshares
Wordcount: Up to 7,500. Excerpts of longer works are welcome if self-contained. Significantly longer work (7,500–20,000 words) can be submitted to the Ploughshares Fall Longform Issue.
Payment: $90-$450
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: Ploughshares has published quality literature since 1971. Our award-winning literary journal is published four times a year; our lively literary blog publishes new writing daily. Since 1989, we have been based at Emerson College in downtown Boston.
NOTE ON LONGFORM: Over the years, Ploughshares has often received longer submissions. Coupled with reader demand for longer, compelling stories and essays perfect for reading one sitting, Ploughshares now accepts long prose pieces for our Fall Longform Issue. This issue, which features nine pieces, is edited by Ploughshares Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and released in October.
We accept fiction and nonfiction (longer stories, essays, and novellas) from 7,500-20,000 words in length and consider submissions during our regular reading period, from June 1 and January 15.
Prairie Fire
Wordcount: Up to 10,000 by snail mail.
Payment: Prose: $0.10 per word with a maximum of $250.
Submissions Period: Rolling
About: Prairie Fire is an award-winning Canadian journal of innovative writing that is published quarterly by Prairie Fire Press, Inc. Each issue is a fresh, vibrant mix of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by our most celebrated writers and the hottest new voices of our emerging writers. It consistently features solid writing that will engage your mind and delight your spirit.
In a typical issue you will find a wide range of writing, including excerpts from a work-in-progress, a thoughtful essay or memoir, literary humour, lots of poetry and fiction, and sometimes something more experimental.
Prairie Fire has been publishing imaginative, provocative, exceptional, worthwhile writing for over 45 years, making it one of Canada’s oldest literary magazines.
River Teeth
Wordcount: No word limit.
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: September 1 to December 1 and January 1 to May 1.
About: River Teeth is a biannual journal combining the best of creative nonfiction, including narrative reportage, essays and memoir, with critical essays that examine the emerging genre and that explore the impact of nonfiction narrative on the lives of its writers, subjects, and readers.
NOTE: River Teeth’s senior editor, Jill Christman, is a contributor to Scars: An Anthology, edited by Erin Wood.
The Rupture
Wordcount: No word limit.
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: Unknown
About: The Rupture published its first issue (as The Collagist) in August 2009 under the editorship of founding editor Matt Bell. Work first published in The Rupture has been featured in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, the Wigleaf top 50, and by Longform and other publications.
Salmagundi
Wordcount: Up to 12,000 via snail mail.
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: January - April
About: Salmagundi is not a tame or genteel quarterly. It invites argument, and it makes a place for literature that is demanding, including novella-length fiction and essays that—in terms of length and range of interest—go well beyond the fare served up by the better weeklies and monthlies. Founded in 1965 and published since 1969 at Skidmore College, Salmagundi routinely publishes essays, reviews, interviews, fiction, poetry, regular columns, polemics, debates and symposia. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectual quarterlies in the United States, and though often discussed as a “little magazine,” it is by no means predominantly belletristic or narrow in its purview or its audience.
Among the writers long associated with Salmagundi are Nadine Gordimer, J.M Coetzee, Tzvetan Todorov, George Steiner, Orlando Patterson, Norman Manea, Christopher Hitchens, Seamus Heaney, Mary Gordon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Barber, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Howard, Carolyn Forché, Rick Moody, Martin Jay, Dubravka Ugresic and David Rieff.
Sequestrum
Wordcount: Up to 12,000
Payment: $20
Submissions Period: Year-round
About:
Sequestrum accepts manuscripts year-round, offers pay-what-you-can subscriptions, publishes on a rolling basis (about every two weeks), pairs all publications with stunning visual components, and is home to award-winning writers and new voices alike. Publishing online awards us the flexibility of maintaining this publication philosophy, as well as keeping access to our Archives available at some of the lowest rates around. We’re proud to be an independent, affordable, sustainable home for literature (it also lets us print our virtual pages on virtual trees, not real ones). Sequestrum isn’t bankrolled by any outside controlling interests and is a self-sustaining literary community. We believe good writing deserves recognition and are a paying market for new and literary-heavyweights alike. Details on all of this stuff is on this website. Poke around; you’ll find what you’re after.
Sequestrum began as a collaborative effort by graduates of Iowa State University and the University of Iowa.
A sequestrum is a necrotic bone fragment, identifiable by its separation from standard skeletal structures. Despite its autonomy, these slivers retain the phosphates and marrows of their source. A sequestrum is a remnant, independent yet interconnected to its origin. And so is the writing we publish. Sequestrum is a journal of short prose and poetry. We publish concise, evocative writing that couldn’t exist in any other form, yet reminds us of the breadth and scope of longer works. Brew us in the morning to swirl with your coffee grounds, or let our bones rattle and sing their skeleton song on your daily subway ride. In the whir of modern life, we spread our splintered dreams under your feet; tread softly, for you tread on our dreams—be them home to many a toothy edge.
The Sewanee Review
Wordcount: Up to 10,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: September 1-May 31
About: Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, have appeared in the magazine. SR also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent: we published excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels, and the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
In 2017 the novelist Adam Ross (Mr. Peanut, Ladies and Gentlemen) succeeded George Core as editor of the Sewanee Review. Under Ross’s tenure the magazine was redesigned for the first time in seventy-three years, by the book designers Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday, and SR began to publish online as well as in print. 2017 also marked the Sewanee Review’s 125th year of publication. Volume 125 featured exceptional writers like Richard Russo, Francine Prose, Lauren Groff, Ben Fountain, Alice McDermott, Mary Jo Salter, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Danielle Evans, Stephanie Danler, Donika Kelly, Kaveh Akbar, Hannah Pittard, Jamie Quatro, Adam Kirsch, and others. Fall 2017 marked the magazine’s five-hundredth issue.
The magazine’s redesign and recent issues have been covered by the New York Times, the Nashville Scene, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Poets & Writers, Chapter 16, and elsewhere.
Shenandoah
Wordcount: Up to 8,000
Payment: Unknown
Submissions Period: CREATIVE NONFICTION submissions will open again on July 1, 2024 (for 300 submissions). Our submission manager accepts only 800 submissions per month as that is all we can reasonably handle. If submissions are not being accepted during the windows noted, it’s because we’ve already reached 800. We suggest submitting early in the reading period.
About: Shenandoah was founded in 1950 by a group of Washington and Lee University faculty members and undergraduates, Tom Wolfe among them. For a brief time it was primarily an undergraduate magazine, but under the leadership of student editor Tom Carter, Shenandoah became a quarterly, publishing a cast of international writers including e e cummings, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Washington and Lee faculty member James Boatwright expanded the journal and published occasional theme issues, including a thirty-fifth anniversary anthology. After Boatwright’s death in 1988, Dabney Stuart took over as editor. In 1995, R. T. Smith was selected as the magazine’s first full-time editor. In 2011, Shenandoah moved online, and is now a web magazine that publishes semiannually. In August 2018, after the retirement of R. T. Smith, Beth Staples took over as editor. Shenandoah is now part of W&L’s English Department and, under Beth’s direction, is supported by a class of undergraduate interns studying editing and publishing. Former editors include Tom Wolfe, Tom Carter, James Boatwright, Dabney Stuart, and R. T. Smith. Former student workers include Mark Richard, Christian Wiman, Matthew Neill Null, and Rebecca Makkai.
Southern Humanities Review
Wordcount: Open to submissions of any length, but “the essays that get published in our journal are generally no more than 12,000 words.”
Payment: $50
Submissions Period: Nonfiction is always open
About: Southern Humanities Review is the literary quarterly housed in the Department of English at Auburn University. Founded in 1967, SHR publishes fiction, poetry, and essays. Past contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Lydia Davis, Natasha Threthewey, and Sharon Olds.
Work published in SHR is considered for Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. SHR is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
The Southern Review
Wordcount: We rarely publish work that is longer than 10,000 words, though we will consider it.
Payment: The Southern Review pays $50 for the first printed page and $25 for each subsequent printed page with a maximum payment of $200, plus two copies of the issue in which the work appears, and a one-year subscription to The Southern Review.
Submissions Period: September 1 through January 1
About: The Southern Review is one of the nation’s premier literary journals. Hailed by Time as "superior to any other journal in the English language," we have made literary history since our founding in 1935. The Southern Review strives to discover and promote a diverse array of engaging, relevant, and challenging literature—including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from literary luminaries as well as the best established and emerging writers. The journal also features a broad range of visual artists from across the South and around the globe. Established at Louisiana State University, The Southern Review immediately became a literary tastemaker.
THE SUn magazine
Wordcount: No formal word limits, “but we tend not to publish work longer than 7,000 words.”
Payment: $200 and up, based on page length
Submissions Period: Rolling.
About: We publish personal essays, short stories, and poems by established and emerging writers from all over the world.
We encourage submissions from writers whose perspectives are underrepresented in or missing from The Sun. We are particularly looking for work by writers of color, queer and trans writers, writers with disabilities, incarcerated writers, and others who are marginalized on the basis of their circumstances or identity.
Writing from The Sun has won the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Our contributors’ work has also been selected for many of the Best American anthology series, including Best American Essays, Poetry, Short Stories, Spiritual Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Sports Writing.
Swamp Pink
Wordcount: Up to 7,500
Payment: $.05 / word with $200 maximum
Submissions Period: We accept general submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from September 1st to December 31st and February 1st to May 31st. During the month of January, we only accept entries for the swamp pink Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, & Poetry.
About: Formerly known as Crazyhorse, swamp pink publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction semi-monthly online.
Under the Sun online
Wordcount: “We don’t have a lot of guidelines . . . Very short pieces (e.g., 2-3 pages), unless they are so tightly written that they squeak, don’t stand as good of a chance with us as longer ones.”
Payment: $50
Submissions Period: September 1 – January 2
About: Mission to create a supportive community of writers and readers committed to high literary quality. Numerous writers published in Under the Sun have received recognition as notables in The Best American Essays.
Virginia Quarterly Review
Wordcount: Up to 7,000
Payment: “For other prose, such as essays and literary journalism, we generally pay $1,000 and above, at approximately 25 cents per word, depending on length.”
Submissions Period: September 17-30
About: For three quarters of a century, VQR’s primary mission has been to sustain and strengthen Jefferson’s bulwark, long describing itself as “A National Journal of Literature and Discussion.” And for good reason. From its inception in prohibition, through depression and war, in prosperity and peace, the Virginia Quarterly Review has been a haven—and home—for the best essayists, fiction writers, and poets, seeking contributors from every section of the United States and abroad. It has not limited itself to any special field. No topic has been alien: literary, public affairs, the arts, history, the economy. If it could be approached through essay or discussion, poetry or prose, VQR has covered it.
Each issue has contained work both moving and memorable; each has sought to provide the best that contemporary literature can offer. VQR’s distinguished history has included: essays from H. L. Mencken, Allen Tate, Bertrand Russell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Ashmore, C. Vann Woodward, Cleanth Brooks, Dumas Malone, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr.; stories from Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter Taylor, Ward Just, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Mark Harris, and Ann Beattie; poems from the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, James Dickey, Henry Taylor, and Rita Dove. And VQR has not only published the most celebrated names of contemporary writing; equally it has welcomed writers whose names were unknown until they appeared in its pages. VQR hews to one simple standard in its selection of writers: excellence.
VQR has thus made good its purpose of becoming a national publication of popularity and prestige, of independence and integrity. Readable and responsible, it is also entertaining. Though fresh as tomorrow’s newspaper, each issue—read cover to cover upon publication—will still have value a decade later.
Water~Stone Review
Wordcount: Up to 8,000
Payment: $0
Submissions Period: November 1 - April 30
About: Water~Stone Review is a literary annual published by the Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. The review publishes work in all genres as well as essay/reviews and writers’ interviews. Features include three contests and photography curated by students at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.
The Yale Review
Wordcount: Up to 7,500
Payment: “Depending upon the length of the piece, we pay between $500 and $1,500 for print prose (around 3,000–5,000 words), between $200 and $500 for online pieces (around 1,000–3,000 words).”
Submissions Period: September 1 - September 30
About: Join a conversation 200 years in the making. At The Yale Review, we believe in the power of connecting great minds across disciplines, backgrounds, and generations. As a renowned journal of literature and ideas, TYR has been privileged to publish both established names and rising literary talent, including Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, Thomas Mann, Bayard Rustin, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, José Ortega y Gassett, Joyce Carol Oates, James Merrill, Cathy Park Hong, Sheila Heti, Garth Greenwell, and Namwali Serpell. Today, TYR continues to evolve under our editor Meghan O’Rourke, an acclaimed poet, memoirist, and critic.