Call for Submissions on Theme of "Aliens & Cryptids": Manuscrypt Magazine

 

Cult Publishing is looking for art and stories to feature within our Manuscrypt magazine. Applications are currently open for our next issue, with the theme: Aliens & Cryptids.

Story Submissions are open from June 22nd, 2026 and close August 14th, 2026 at 5pm EST. Art Submissions are open from June 22nd, 2026 and close September 4th, 2026 at 5pm EST.

We are looking for horror stories meant to entice the reader and leave lasting impressions. Submissions can be poetry, short stories, etc., but there must be an element of horror. Art submitted to the magazine can be photography, digital art, and drawings, but we are not limited to these mediums.

Each issue will revolve around a certain binding theme. Though it is not mandatory that entries fit this theme, stories and art that connect to the theme will be favoured for submissions.

Submissions should be written in English and up to 3,500 words. Work toward the upper limit will be held to a higher standard of craft. All submissions of written work must be formatted to Shunn Manuscript standard and sent as a DOCX attachment.

Accepted original submissions (stories and art) will receive $50.00 USD, and there is no fee to submit.

We are not able to offer payment for reprints.

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions on Theme of "City/Country": South 85

 

South 85 Journal is open for submissions June 18 ~ August 1, 2026. Our theme is city | country. To get a sense of our journal, please check out our most recent issue, surprise us | unthemed.

ISSUE: CITY | COUNTRY 

• Cars careening, horns blaring, the blur of conversations caught snippet by tantalizing snippet on the sidewalk? Crickets, cicadas, butterflies, birds, a cheerful creek? Silver skyscrapers or silvery moon? Walking fast, walking slow, sitting at the bus stop, sitting on the front porch? Dirty or dirt? Space measured in square feet or acres or sky or stories?

• The wealth of every nation’s most excellent cuisine on a menu or a ripe tomato you grew yourself?

• Where are you most alive? Where were you born to be? Where is your heart? Where is your family? But where are you right now?

• Surrounded by nature, terrified of nature, finding nature in unexpected places, nurturing nature? Is a cockroach nature? Is a mosquito?

• Where is the rain gentle? The snow pretty? The storms shattering? Which season is the show-off? Where are the celebrations you remember? Who are the people you understand, who you understand all too well, who you’ll never possibly understand? Who are your people?

• What happened that one time that you’ll never, ever forget? Where is that place and time you can’t go back to? Where will you stay forever? Where is home?

• With each of our themes, the possibilities are endless, and we want this theme to feel open to countless interpretation, introspection, and examination. As always, we’re eager to read what you come up with.

Fiction submissions should be between 800 and 4000ish words. Please include word count. Flash fiction should be under 750ish words, submitted to the flash category. One story per submission.

Nonfiction submissions should be between 800 and 4000ish words. Please include word count. Flash nonfiction should be under 750ish words, submitted to the flash category. One piece per submission.

Poetry submissions should contain no more than 3 poems, up to 6 total pages, one poem per page. 

Please send only one submission per category (Poetry, Fiction, Flash, and Non-Fiction) during each reading period. You are welcome to submit to multiple categories. We suggest including the title of your work in your file name.

Submission fee = $3

We will publish novel excerpts, provided they can stand on their own. We do not publish genre fiction or children’s stories. We encourage you to read archives of South 85 Journal and acquaint yourself with the material we publish before submitting your work. We encourage the use of a content warning if necessary, in consideration of our manuscript readers.

Type should be no smaller than 12-pt. font. Please use a standard font such as Times New Roman or Arial, and refrain from script or “flowery” lettering.

We do not solicit work; each published piece comes to us through Submittable.

We accept simultaneous submissions. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please promptly withdraw your piece via Submittable or email to withdraw individual poems: 

south85journal AT gmail DOT com (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

Please include a professional bio of 50ish words written in the third person with your cover letter.

We are NOT interested in reading work composed or edited or reviewed with the use of AI. Please–help us keep our journal human!

South 85 Journal does not publish work which has been previously published, either in print or online.

Our reply time is typically eight weeks or so.

We acquire exclusive first-time Internet rights only. All other rights revert to the author at publication, but we offer formal, written reassignments upon request. Works are also archived online.

We are unable to pay for submissions, however thanks to an anonymous donor, ONE piece in the issue will be awarded the Editor’s Choice Award of $100. We ask that whenever an author reprints the work that first appeared in our pages, South 85 Journal be given acknowledgment for the specific work(s) involved.

Interviews: If you would like to conduct an interview with a literary writer with whose book has been published or is forthcoming within the last year or so, please send a query via email:

south85journal AT gmail DOT com (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions: trampset

 

Thank you for your interest in trampset. We are looking for short fiction (short stories, flash fiction, and excerpts from longer works), nonfiction (personal essays, literary journalism, flash cnf), and poetry. Prose should be no longer than 3,000 words. Up to three flash or micro pieces may be submitted in a single document. Poetry submissions should contain no more than three poems in a single document. We are not a good home for shape poetry. We also welcome translation submissions if the translator has obtained appropriate permission from the author. We are open to all styles of work though shorter pieces tend to get more love. We welcome diverse voices, including writers working outside academia. We welcome simultaneous submissions but not multiple submissions at once. 

We welcome all tramps but will NOT consider AI or AI-assisted submissions.

Submissions should be uploaded in a single Word document at our Submittable page here.

We have a permanent free submission category we expect most writers to use. We also have a “Tip Jar” option for each genre and a “Quick Response” option for writers wanting to hear back sooner. What we make from tips and the expedited response option goes to our writers and editors and site costs.

Regular response times vary, but we try to respond within 1–3 months, if not sooner. We publish accepted pieces throughout the year and inform the writer when their piece will run. If your work is accepted for publication, you retain all rights. We don’t use contracts. We just ask you give us the honor to publish it first on our website (we consider previously published material from time to time) and the ability to keep it in our archives. Also, as a courtesy, please credit trampset if the work is republished elsewhere. We ask that submitters wait a month after a response before submitting again and contributors wait six months after publication before submitting again.

We pay $30 per accepted piece (must have PayPal). Each year we nominate select pieces for anthologies like Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Nominees are notified and listed on our site.

Call for Submissions on Theme of "Suspension" : Apus

There are moments in life when we find ourselves suspended: between places, identities, relationships, languages, futures, or versions of ourselves. We drift. We hesitate. We remain unfinished.

Suspension can feel like weightlessness, disorientation, or stillness. It may emerge in the silence before collapse, in the pause before transformation, in the strange calm of no longer belonging entirely to what once held us.To be suspended is not always to be lost. It can be a refusal to settle too quickly into certainty — an unsettling space where desire, memory, and selfhood take shape.

For our third issue, we invite works that dwell in states of suspension — emotional, bodily, political, spatial, linguistic, or otherwise. We welcome work that lingers in ambiguity, experiments with form, and resists easy resolution.

Submission Guidelines

Genres: Fiction, poetry, interviews, nonfiction, and visual art.

Word Limit: Up to 15,000 words (Chinese) or 10,000 words (English). Poetry should not exceed 200 lines.

Pay:
- Prose: Starting from $10 USD per 1,000 words
- Poetry and Visual art: Payment will be determined based on the format and quantity of the submitted work. 

Submission Limit: Each author may submit up to two works for this call.

Submit: Email to:

submit@apuslit.com or via Duotrope 

Deadline: Aug 31, 2026 

Terms and Conditions

Authors takes full responsibility for the content of the submission. It must not involve plagiarism.

We don’t accept previous published work unless it was published on a personal account.

Please refrain from simultaneous submissions.

Please include a brief bio and contact information with your submission.

If you do not receive a response within 30 business days after the deadline, you are free to submit elsewhere.

Apus reserves the right to make editorial revisions to submitted works.

Upon acceptance, Apus reserves first serial, reprint and electronic rights.

Authors should notify Apus immediately if work is no longer avaliable for publication.

Let us know if you have any questions，期待在文字中相会！

Call for Submissions: Feed the Holy

SUBMISSION CALL

These are fraught times. Share positive energy and help people achieve peace of mind and heart. What brings you joy? How do you feed the holy or sacred in your life or community? How do you nurture love and kindness? What is it like to be human in this world? How and why do we suffer? How and why do we grieve? How do we heal? How do we honor nature? Others? Ourselves? The topic is broad and nuanced. However, please read these guidelines and the post with other details about submitting.

Submissions are free and open year round.

1. Submit up to 3 poems, 1 personal essay/memoir, or 1 flash fiction piece at a time. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but once we have scheduled the submissions, we will not pull them. Word lengths for prose and fiction are negotiable.

2. Poetry: Left or center-aligned, minimal indenting. Prose: left-aligned

3. I prefer to select the images. However, original art can be submitted to illustrate your post. NO AI-generated images will be accepted.

4. Include a photo of you and a short third-person bio (50 words or less).

5. Reprints are acceptable. Please state where the work was first published.

6. Please proofread and edit before submitting (This includes the bio).

7. Email submissions to:

meelosmom@gmail.com 

In the Subject line, state "FEED THE HOLY SUBMISSION. Attach the submission as a Word document. Use Times New Roman 12.

8. Please pace submissions. Do not resubmit until your piece is published.

9. After publication, all rights revert to the author. If your work is republished in the future, please credit FEED THE HOLY as the previous publisher.

What we DON’T want:

1. NO ranting, racism, antisemitism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or sexually explicit subject matter. No blaming or shaming. No profanity. We aspire to be a diverse community built on mutual respect.

2. This is NOT a forum to promote a religion, a political party, or a product. No horror themes or battles with Satan, please.

3. NO AI-composed writing, only human writing.

Before you submit, please read this post: Why Do We Feed the Holy?

I look forward to your submissions!

Barbara Leonhard, Editor

Writing Competition: StoryBottle Fiction Chapbook Prize

We’re excited to open up our first fiction chapbook contest in 2026. At StoryBottle, we’ve always been interested in immersive storytelling regardless of genre—we want the high-brow literary, the pulpy, the strange, and the stories that don’t fit neatly anywhere at all. Now we’re interested in seeing what happens when story gets cracked open just a little wider. Maybe that thing you’ve been carrying around isn’t a story so much as a fiction object: a handful of linked stories, a collection of flash, one strange novelette, or something harder to classify altogether. We’re looking for the same great, weird work we love publishing at StoryBottle, just with more room to breathe. 

The winner will receive $1,000 and 25 author copies of the perfect-bound chapbook. All entrants will also be considered for publication both as individual stories in StoryBottle online and in print, as well as for future chapbook projects. Send us the thing that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else—we want to see what story can do when the bottle gets a little bigger.

Guidelines:

Deadline: August 15, 2026

Entry Fee: $17

Length: up to 60 pages of fiction

Manuscripts may include any combination of flash fiction, short stories, linked stories, story cycles, or novelettes.

Multiple and simultaneous submissions are fine, but each chapbook must be submitted separately and withdrawn if accepted elsewhere.

Entries must be unpublished in their current manuscript form. Individual stories previously appearing elsewhere are welcome; please include an acknowledgements page listing prior publications.

Don't include your name in the manuscript.

Writers with close personal or professional relationships with the editors are not eligible.

Submit your entry here. 

Poetry Competition: Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize

Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize

Final Judge: Lee Herrick!

Three prizes: $1,000, $500, $250.

Five finalists published in 2026 red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine.

Letterpress broadside of winning poem printed by Gary Young, Greenhouse Review Press!

The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2026 will be open for submissions on April 1, 2026. Thank you for the opportunity to read your work!

Submit up to three unpublished poems in a single manuscript. Each poem must fit onto one 8.5 x 11 inch page;

Do not include any personal identifiers in the manuscript, manuscript file name, and the title line when submitting;

Short bio acceptable, not required;

Deadline to submit: 31 July 2026;

Fee per manuscript is $15.00;

Simultaneous submission OK but please notify immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

The contest is open to all styles of poetry from national and international participants writing in English except individuals who are employees and/or board members for Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine and Poetry Center San José.

Submit your entry here.