Call for Submissions: the museum of americana

Issue 25: My Americana
During August 2021 we will accept submissions for Issue 25, a milestone achievement. With our theme “My Americana,” we seek to highlight work from writers and artists who are traditionally marginalized in publishing. We will prioritize work from writers and artists of color; specifically, we are interested in intersectionality. By modifying Americana, we hope writers and artists will expand the definition of the concept.

Note: We seek work that engages with or repurposes the complex cultural history of America. We are particularly interested in work from writers, artists, and musicians who are traditionally marginalized from publishing. 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, examines, or repurposes historical American culture. This is, of course, an enormous and diverse tub of spare parts, and we want to see what you can create. 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 from WWII propaganda posters. We want aspects of Americana we may not have even heard of yet.

Submissions of fiction, nonfiction, humor writing, poetry, and art will be read in the months of April, August, and December. Submissions sent at any other time will be deleted unread. Reviews, interviews, and music for American Songbook will be considered all year round.

Issues are scheduled to appear in February, June, and October.

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:

Editorial Inquiries: exec.ed.americana (at) gmail.com
Fiction and Nonfiction: proseamericana (at) gmail.com
Poetry: poetryamericana (at) gmail.com
Humor: humoramericana (at) gmail.com
American Songbook: music.themuseum (at) gmail.com
Art: art.themuseum (at) gmail.com
Interviews and Reviews: reviewsamericana (at) gmail.com

All submissions should contain a brief cover letter in the email and include a short bio. 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. 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. 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 they 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.

For more information, please visit our website.