Call for Submissions: The Lemonwood Quarterly

 

What to Submit

The Lemonwood Quarterly seeks the best English language short stories and plays we can find. We do not publish poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction prose, book reviews, or interviews. We are looking for superbly written stories and play pieces between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Please submit a double-spaced Word document.

We especially seek out stories with female protagonists who are well into adulthood. There’s no minimum age requirement, but if your protagonist is not at least over thirty years old or so, it could be difficult for them to carry forward the type of stories we aim to publish. We definitely are not looking for coming-of-age stories. We are excited to showcase stories with protagonists who have already passed through those earlier milestones or hurdles and are at a different point in their life.

Who Should Submit

We welcome and encourage submissions from writers of every gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality —including writers without fancy degrees or previously published work, and whose perspectives might be underrepresented in the literary world. Please do not send us work that includes machine-generated or AI text.

How to Submit

We accept only online submissions through the link below. Please do not send us emails or hard copies of your manuscripts. An online submission fee of $4 to help cover administrative costs is required to complete your submission.

Submissions are read anonymously, so please do not include your name anywhere on the word document itself. You will provide your identifying information in the submission form.

When to Submit

Our magazine is quarterly, so we are frequently considering new submissions. Our submission period may close if we reach our submissions capacity, so submit early. Please submit only one story or play at a time and wait to hear back from us before submitting again. We aim to respond within one to six months. If your story is selected for publication, please wait until the issue with your piece has been published before submitting another story. If your story is rejected, please send us new work; do not resubmit previously rejected stories.

Simultaneous Submissions to other Publications are fine, but please indicate in your submissions form that the work has been submitted to another journal. If work that you have submitted to us is accepted elsewhere, please notify us immediately via our contact form to withdraw your submission.

All work should be previously unpublished in any form, including online, in blogs, or in print.

Translations are accepted. Translators should acquire translation rights from the copyright holder before submitting. In the submission form, in addition to your translation and your own information, you will be asked for a copy of the original work, the author’s name, the work’s original title, a note stating the original language in which it was written, as well as a short bio about the author.

Revisions

Please send us your work in its final fully edited form. We do not have the staff available to consider individual revisions. If you feel you must revise, please contact us via the contact form to withdraw your submission, and resubmit the newly edited piece. It may take several days for your withdraw request to be processed.

Refunds of the submission fee cannot be made after the piece has been submitted, even if you need to withdraw the work. If you withdraw a submission and you want to submit a different piece, you cannot swap them out; you must make a new submission.

Compensation to Authors for their Work 

• The Lemonwood Quarterly pays all of our contributors a flat rate. The current rate is $200 for every story or play published in our magazine.  

• All stories published by us in the calendar year are automatically entered for consideration for the $1000 Charlotte Ann Porter Prize for Fiction.  

• All dramatic pieces published in The Lemonwood Quarterly in a given calendar year are automatically entered in the running for the $500 Hononegah Mack Prize for the Best Play.  

• We will nominate as many pieces as we can to annual literary prizes such as The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Award and The Best American Short Stories.  

• Contributing authors will be featured on our website and will have the opportunity to submit an updated bio, a photo, and any links to their social media.  

• Authors will receive a contract upon acceptance and payment upon publication. The Lemonwood Quarterly’s publishing agreement includes the following rights: First worldwide electronic publication rights; non-exclusive online rights on our website, and other limited rights. Copyright is retained by the author. Authors are free to resell the work, although we do ask for a 90-day exclusive from our first publication of the work. We ask that whenever an author reprints a piece that first appeared in our magazine, The Lemonwood Quarterly is given acknowledgement as the work’s original publisher. 

Submit your work here.