Call for Submissions: the museum of americana

We are open for general submissions from December 1st to 30th. 

During this unprecedented and uncertain period, our response time for submissions may be delayed. If you have an outstanding submission or general question, please know we will do our best to follow up as soon as possible. Thank you so much for your patience, and please stay safe and be well. 

Note: We seek work that engages with or repurposes the complex cultural history of America. Please read our General Guidelines below for more information on how and what to submit. 

General Guidelines: the museum of americana accepts submissions of original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book/chapbook reviews, writer interviews, music, photography, and art. We seek work that showcases and/or repurposes historical American culture. This is, of course, an enormous and diverse tub of spare parts, and we want to see if you can turn them into a hot rod. Give us fiction that dramatizes weird old folk songs or steals their characters. Give us love poetry that mixes language cribbed from The Federalist Papers with language cribbed from WWII propaganda posters. We want medicine shows and riverboats, Doo-Wop and Duke Snider. We want aspects of Americana we may not have even heard of yet.

To submit to the museum of americana, please include your last name, first name, and genre of submission in the subject of your email and send to the appropriate address. 

Fiction/nonfiction: 

proseamericana (at) gmail.com 

Poetry: 

poetryamericana (at) gmail.com 

Humor: 

humoramericana (at) gmail.com 

American Songbook: 

themuseumofamericana (at) gmail.com 

Art: 

themuseumofamericana (at) gmail.com

For interviews or reviews, query editor first: 

reviewsamericana (at) gmail.com

All submissions should contain a brief cover letter in the email. Poetry, prose, and humor submissions should be pasted into the text of the email. No attachments, please. We will read one longer prose piece (up to 3,000 words), one humor piece (up to 1,500 words), or three to five poems or flashes per submission. For photographs or art, please send a link to where work can be viewed online. For American Songbook, send up to five mp3s and a short bio. Songs must be public domain American traditionals or else originals in the folk/Americana vein. Only one submission per genre per reading period, please.

Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please be courteous enough to inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. No previously published work. Upon acceptance, we ask for first electronic rights and the right to archive a piece for as long as we exist. We also ask that a writer not reprint a piece online for at least six months after we publish it and that we receive credit if it should be reprinted at any point, in print or electronically, in the future.

If a writer has been published with the museum of americana, we ask that she/he wait until two new issues appear before submitting work again.

Unfortunately, there is no payment for publication, but we will publicize our contributors to the best of our ability and spread the news of their successes all across the interwebs.