Call for Volunteer Readers: The Adroit Journal

Prose Reader

Prose readers get the first crack at all submissions in their specified genre, and are expected to review fiction and nonfiction (and hybrid) submissions regularly and consistently. Reviewing submissions includes voting, providing comments, and participating in occasional discussions about pieces on the bubble. (Est. commitment: 3.5 hrs/week.)

Before applying please familiarize yourself with the journal by visiting our About page, and perhaps also an issue or two.

APPLICATION DETAILS:

I. STATEMENT

Please briefly (no more than a page double-spaced) explain what qualifies you for this position, and what you would add to the journal’s literary and/or artistic community. You are encouraged to include things such as experience in the specific field(s), writing publication, and other commendations and accolades, but this Adroit Statement should NOT read like a résumé.

At the end of the day, the statement should highlight your history, passion, and experience with the areas of the position and creative writing. Feel free to discuss other topics you feel are appropriate, as well as any specific connections, measures, or initiatives you might have (or aspire to have) with The Adroit Journal’s staff community.

2. PLEASE UPLOAD A WRITING SAMPLE (8-10 pages of poetry or 12-15 double-spaced pages of prose) *for all Editorial roles

ELIGIBILITY:

We are fully open to all readers and writers. At this time, for editorial roles, we are not open to editorial staff on the masthead of other internationally-staffed unaffiliated literary journals. Publications that consider solely campus work, or work with specific geographic eligibility requirements, do not apply to this restriction. Non-editorial roles are exempt from this proviso.
As we seek to fill open positions sooner rather than later, we consider applications on a rolling basis.
***Unless otherwise specified, all positions are volunteer and remote in nature & have a start-date of ASAP.***

~~~

Poetry Reader

Poetry readers get the first crack at all poetry submissions and are expected to submissions regularly and consistently. Reviewing submissions includes voting, providing comments, and participating in occasional discussions about pieces on the bubble. (Est. commitment: 3.5 hrs/week.)

Before applying please familiarize yourself with the journal by visiting our About page, and perhaps also an issue or two.
APPLICATION DETAILS:

I. STATEMENT

Please briefly (no more than a page double-spaced) explain what qualifies you for this position, and what you would add to the journal’s literary and/or artistic community. You are encouraged to include things such as experience in the specific field(s), writing publication, and other commendations and accolades, but this Adroit Statement should NOT read like a résumé.

At the end of the day, the statement should highlight your history, passion, and experience with the areas of the position and creative writing. Feel free to discuss other topics you feel are appropriate, as well as any specific connections, measures, or initiatives you might have (or aspire to have) with The Adroit Journal’s staff community.

2. PLEASE UPLOAD A WRITING SAMPLE (8-10 pages of poetry or 12-15 double-spaced pages of prose) *for all Editorial roles

ELIGIBILITY:

We are fully open to all readers and writers. At this time, for editorial roles, we are not open to editorial staff on the masthead of other internationally-staffed unaffiliated literary journals. Publications that consider solely campus work, or work with specific geographic eligibility requirements, do not apply to this restriction. Non-editorial roles are exempt from this proviso.
As we seek to fill open positions sooner rather than later, we consider applications on a rolling basis.
***Unless otherwise specified, all positions are volunteer and remote in nature & have a start-date of ASAP.***

Apply here.

Call for Submissions from Students Ages 13-22: Blue Marble Review

 

Thanks for your interest in Blue Marble Review. We welcome submissions from students ages 13-22. Please take a look at our submission guidelines, and fill out the form below. Please use a personal, or parent email (or gmail) but not a school email. School email filters will often block our responses. We look forward to reading your work.

What to Send:

Blue Marble Review is published four times a year and accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, essays, opinion pieces, travel writing, photography and art on a rolling basis. We are looking for new work that hasn’t been published anywhere else either online or in print.

Fiction:

Send us your stories! Flash, short stories, hybrid forms-all in 1500 words or less. A maximum of three pieces per submission.

Non-Fiction:

We accept memoir, personal essays, travel adventures, and have been known to publish the occasional research paper and book review. One to two pieces per submission please.(1500 word limit)

Poetry:

Up to three poems per submission.

Art:

Four pieces of artwork (scanned, jpeg format) or four photographs per submission.

Payment:

Contributors published online in Blue Marble Review will receive $30 per published piece, $75 for cover art.

When you submit to Blue Marble Review you are allowing us First Serial Rights as well as the right to archive your work on our site. Copyrights of all work published in Blue Marble Review remain with the author.

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions on Theme of "What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human": Bellevue Literary Review

Bellevue Literary Review seeks high-caliber, unpublished work, broadly and creatively related to our themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.

Submissions are OPEN for our upcoming theme issue on “Animalia: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human” until December 31, 2024. We will also be accepting general submissions at this time. We can’t wait to read your work!

Animalia: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human

BLR is seeking creative writing about the ways in which animals figure into our lives and the way they live theirs. Whether companion or wild, predator or prey, animals’ experiences of health can shine a light on our own. BLR invites submissions that explore how health and healing both transcend and interconnect species, and what this can teach us about being human.

Fiction/nonfiction word max is 5,000 words (though most of our published prose is in the range of 2,000-4,000 words).

Fiction: We seek character-driven fiction with original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror). We have only occasionally published flash fiction. While we are always interested in creative explorations in style, we do lean toward classic short stories.

Nonfiction: We are looking for essays that reach beyond the standard ‘illness narrative’ to develop a topic in an engaging and original manner. Incorporate engaging and creative analysis that allows anecdotes to serve a larger purpose. (Please, no academic discourses or works with footnotes. )

Poetry: We encourage poems that are accessible to a wide audience. Characteristics we look for are vivid writing, strong narrative, and rendering the familiar new. We encourage you to peruse back issues in our archive to get a sense of our ethos. Please submit no more than three poems. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document.

Guidelines

We happily consider simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Manuscripts can only be accepted electronically via Submittable.

Fiction and nonfiction should not exceed 5,000 words (double-spaced, please). Most of our published prose is in the range of 2,500-4,000 words, which allows us to publish more authors.

You may submit up to three poems as one submission. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document. Poems can be of any length, though shorter poems allow us to include more poets in our pages.

There is a $5 fee per general submission but it’s waived for current subscribers. (If you are not a current subscriber, you can subscribe when you submit your work and take advantage of free submission.) These fees help BLR fund publication of the journal, but if it’s a hardship for you, please contact us.

We strive to provide several reviewers for each manuscript and kindly ask your patience in this necessarily slow process. But if you have not heard from us within five months, feel free to inquire about your manuscript.

BLR pays $75 for poetry and $150 for prose. Published authors will receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears, plus an additional 1-year subscription to BLR. There is an author discount for purchasing extra copies.

All submissions must be of previously unpublished work.* BLR acquires First North American rights, and the right to reprint in anthologies and online. After publication, all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to BLR is made.

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions: The Temz Review

Prose (for the journal)
We publish prose (fiction and creative non-fiction) up to 10,000 words long. We will consider pieces longer than 10,000 words, but they need to earn their length.

We pay $20 per piece.

If your piece is longer than 1000 words, please submit only one piece. If your pieces are fewer than 1000 words each, feel free to submit several pieces at once.

We are looking for innovative short fiction from diverse voices. Our preference is for the strange, the experimental and the boundary-pushing, but we are open to a wide range of styles and voices.

Poetry (for the journal)
We accept submissions of 1-8 poems, depending on the length of the poems.

We prefer poetry submissions to be 10 pages or fewer. You can certainly send us longer submissions, particularly if you are submitting a long poem, but longer submissions need to earn their length.

We pay $20 per batch of poems we publish.

Our preference is for innovative verse that pushes the boundaries of poetry, but we are open to a wide range of styles and voices.

Please submit only once per reading period.

Reviews and Interviews (for the journal)

We do not accept reviews or interviews submitted through Moksha. If you are interested in writing a review for us or placing an interview with us, please query us first at:

thetemzreview[at]gmail[dot]com (Change [at] to @ and [dot] to . )

We are particularly interested in reviews of Canadian small press titles and of works in translation, and in interviews with the authors of this kind of work.

Simultaneous Submissions Welcome!
We welcome simultaneous submissions, provided you notify us and/or withdraw a piece that is accepted for publication elsewhere. 

More information and submission portal here.

Writing Competition: The Sarabande Chapbook Prize

The Sarabande Chapbook prize

SUBMIT September 1 - 30

In celebration of Sarabande’s 30th anniversary, the inaugural Sarabande Chapbook Prize will be awarded to two winners from our 2024 submission period. The prize includes $1,000, publication, and a standard royalty contract.

Genre

We’re looking for traditional poetry chapbooks and hybrid/experimental projects. (For examples of hybrid projects we’ve loved, see Hotel Almighty, Team Photograph, Thot, Bright, White Bull, A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause, and more.)

ELIGIBILITY

This Sarabande Chapbook Prize is open to any poet or writer of English. Employees and board members of Sarabande are not eligible. Translations and previously published collections are not eligible. Works that have previously appeared in part in magazines or in anthologies may be included. 

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Manuscript must be anonymous

Manuscript must be typed, standard font, 12 pt., paginated

Between 20-30 pages, single spaced

Must be accompanied by a $25 submission fee

Must be submitted electronically through Submittable

Multiple submissions are permitted if submitted separately, each with a submission fee. Edits to submissions will not be permitted, but any publications resulting from this contest will undergo a full editorial and copyedit. Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted, but please withdraw your manuscript if accepted elsewhere.

More information and submission portal here.

Fellowship: Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans

This fellowship supports thirty New Americans— immigrants or the children of immigrants—who are pursuing graduate or professional school in the U.S. Each Fellowship supports one to two years of graduate study in any field and in any advanced degree-granting program in the U.S. up to a total of $90,000.

Deadline: October 31, 2024 

To apply for the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships, you’ll need to create an account and start the online application. You’ll fill out eligibility and demographic questions, share information about your educational and New American background, and then you will have to submit relevant transcripts, a resume or CV, two essays, and then register three to five recommendations.

Once we receive and review the applications, the top 77 applicants will be designated “finalists” and will be asked to appear for virtual interviews in late January and early February of 2025. 30 of the the 77 finalists will be selected as Fellows and will be notified in March of 2025. The 2025 Fellows will be announced publicly in April of 2025 and they will begin to receive stipend and tuition support from the program in the fall of 2025, and they will also attend the Fellowship’s Fall Conference, all expenses paid, that October.

• PD Soros supports all types of full-time graduate and professional degrees at accredited institutions in the United States.

• You can apply when you’re applying to graduate or professional school, or when you’re in the first two years of the academic program you’re seeking funding for.

• You can apply more than once and the application is free.

• The first year of the Fellowship can’t be deferred.

• All application materials must be submitted online through the online application.

• We make no exceptions to the 2 pm ET application deadline on October 31, 2024.Our eligibility requirements include your status as an immigrant or a child of immigrants, your age, and your academic standing. We do not look at school, GPA, or test score range. All eligibility requirements should apply to you as of October 31, 2024. If named a finalist, you will be required to provide documentation of your eligibility.

More information and application portal here.

Call for Submissions: Wrong Turn Lit

What We Want

We’re always looking for literary work - fiction, essays, poetry, book reviews - that takes risks and demonstrates an excellence of craft. We want to be entertained, or made slightly uncomfortable, but most importantly, left in awe of what you can do with words. We’re word people. Send us what you’re too afraid to show anyone else.

What We Don’t Want

We are not interested in works previously published online or “curated” or in-print, except for translations. Nor do we accept any AI-generated text.

How to Submit

We currently accept submissions via Submittable or Duosuma.

Formatting Requirements

For prose: Submissions must be 1,500 words or less. Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but let us know if your piece is accepted elsewhere. Send only one piece at a time and wait for a response before sending another. Multiple submissions will be deleted unread.

With your submission, include a standard cover letter with your contact information, word count, and a short, third person bio (50-100 words max). We read submissions blind, so make sure your name is removed from the file name as well as the document you submit. Format your work according to the standard MLA Guidelines: Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced, with page numbers and word count in the header. We prefer Word documents, for editorial purposes, but will accept pdfs as long as they follow the above format.

For poetry:

Submissions may consist of up to three individual poems. Single-spaced is preferred, Times New Roman. Your poems should all be included within the same word document. Each individual poem should be no longer than a page in length. We are not the right fit for long, epic, or funkily-spaced poetry (Sorry, Cummings).

We tend to prefer the lyrical, but take a look at what we’ve published in fiction and nonfiction, and if you think your poems fit our aesthetic, send them along.

Failure to follow any of the above guidelines will result in automatic rejection. Don’t waste our time, and we won’t waste yours.

If you have been published by Wrong Turn Lit, we ask that you wait one month after publication to send us more stuff.

Response Time

We try to respond as soon as possible, but depending on the volume of submissions, sometimes it may take a month or two.

Important Note: We are editors for a reason. We like to be very hands-on with the pieces we accept. No matter how much we like a piece, there is always room to improve. If you’re uncomfortable or unwilling to revise your work with our editorial team, then we are not for you.

For Book Reviews:

We're now accepting Book Reviews for publication in addition to our weekly regular fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. For this call, we want to focus specifically on books published by small presses. These can be chapbooks or full length novels, memoirs, story or poetry collections, etc.

In general, you should try to follow John Updike's guide for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author intended to write, and don’t punish him or her for something she or he did not attempt to do.

2. Provide enough quotations from the work to give the review reader a feel for the quality of the prose.

3. Confirm your description of the work with quotations and other evidence from it.

4. Limit your plot summary, and never give away the ending. Don’t spoil the experience for others.

5. When a book is deficient in quality, cite similar examples of good books (perhaps even by the same author). Try to understand and explain what went wrong; don’t just do a “hatchet job.”

6. Don’t review books you are predisposed to dislike or like (for instance, one written by a friend); don’t see yourself as a caretaker for some tradition or standard of literature; don’t try to put an author “in his place” with your critique; and always review the book, not the reputation.

We are not looking for hit pieces or vulgar takedowns. The ideal review will generously engage with the book and encourage further engagement. That does not mean the review must be overwhelmingly positive or positive in any way. But our goal here is to bring more attention to books that are being overlooked by the mainstream press and provide a space for further discussion of independent literature.

Follow our standard formatting guidelines. The word count on these can be a bit higher than our usual, somewhere between 2,000-3,000 words is probably the sweet spot, though we're happy to look at what you can do in a shorter span.

If you'd like to query about potentially reviewing a book (forthcoming or already published), send us an email or direct message.

Rights & Payment

You always retain the copyright to your work.

If we decide to publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 30 days and non-exclusive rights for the duration of the journal so that it may appear in our archived issues.

Right now, we're unable to offer monetary compensation; however, we gift all our contributors a complimentary one-year paid subscription to our journal with all the bells and whistles.

If your work is subsequently published elsewhere, we would greatly appreciate your acknowledgement of Wrong Turn Lit as the site of first publication.

More information here.