Call for Submissions: thelunchhour

thelunchhour

we are currently open for submissions.

through may 1st or until we reach contributor cap.

what to submit

send up to five pieces of poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, & anything else. if you wrote it, submit it! we welcome both unpublished & published work, but please give credit in your document to where the work appeared first. please include all work in one document (pdf or doc). i don't have a preference over font & font size, nor line spacing.

what not to submit

we are not considering work made or inspired by ai, nor plagiarized, unoriginal, or stolen pieces. please do not include photos in your work, unless the specific format calls for that. i have a hard time getting through super lengthy work, so i will generally pass on those. also, do not send me any work that encourages racism, bigotry, sexism, etc.

what happens after i submit?

you'll have a decision in your inbox hopefully in a week or two. worse case scenario, it will be no longer than a month. you'll be notified even if it's rejected, i won't leave you hanging! please note: i sometimes don't read emails or submissions on weekends, so any inquiries over those days will be promptly answered on monday! if you are declined during this reading period, please wait until the following period to submit again!

what happens to contributors?

my contributors will receive payment of $10 per piece within a month of publication. payments can only be dispersed through cashapp, paypal, or chime, & i do not have any alternative methods i can work out. i am not offering contributor copies at this time, but your issue will always be available for purchase.

how to submit

please click here to submit your work to thelunchhour.

Call for Submissions: Justice Reads

 Justice Reads is an online feminist journal of literature, voice, and justice. We invite literary submissions of written work that connects to themes of social justice, feminism, and women's rights. Our platform is dedicated to sparking thoughtful conversations about these topics while creating a space where individuals can express their voices, ideas, and art. Whether your work highlights art, personal stories, or social commentary/critical analysis, we welcome all voices and look forward to reading your work. Thank you for submitting to Justice Reads!

Payment: $50 for poetry, short fiction, or nonfiction 

More details and submission portal here.

Artists' Residency: The Studios of Key West

Applications are now being accepted for residencies falling between October 2025 and August 2026.

DEADLINE TO APPLY: May 15, 2025

All applicants will be notified of their status by July 18, 2025.

The Studios of Key West, the premier arts organization at the Southernmost Point of the United States, offers a residency program for emerging and established artists and writers from around the world. We provide residencies to visual artists, writers, composers, musicians, media artists, performers, and interdisciplinary artists.

The program grants nearly 40 artists each year the time and space to imagine new artistic work, engage in valuable dialogue and explore island connections.

The Studios’ residency program is community-based and built upon the hope that visiting artists will take inspiration from Key West’s rich artistic past and present, and will engage with — and be inspired by — the remarkable people and culture that surrounds them.

Key West’s official motto, “One Human Family” reflects our commitment to living together as caring, sharing neighbors dedicated to making our home as close to paradise as we can. To that end, we encourage artists of all races, nationalities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and abilities to apply.

The History

The Studios of Key West was founded in 2006 with the initial inspiration of simply providing space for artists to live and work, thereby drawing creative people to our island and enriching the lives of all who live here. In those earliest days, our founder Peyton Evans gathered fourteen of Key West’s most successful artists and writers and arranged for them to participate in artist residency programs throughout the country, then return to help us craft our own program combining the best of what they’d seen and learned.

Hundreds of writers and artists have since come to Key West through the Peyton Evans Artist Residency (PEAR) Program, many returning and several relocating permanently. Each has benefited from the island’s unique character, and left something of themselves behind. The PEAR Program celebrates the spirit of exploration with which it was founded, the artists it was established to serve, and the vision, wisdom and generosity of the woman for whom it’s named. 

More information and application portal here.

Call for Submissions: Folklore Review

We are looking for poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and art inspired by folklore. We love unique, weird works that leave an imprint on us. Send us stories from a haunted wood, woven in greenery and bark. Tell us of the creatures that live in your mind. Gods, ghosts, ghouls—or something completely different.

Short stories and creative nonfiction submissions should be up to 7500 words.

Flash fiction submissions should be 1000 words or less.

Poetry submissions should include up to five poems in a single document.

Art submissions should include up to five pieces.

Please limit your submissions to previously unpublished works. Stories, poems, and artworks that are published elsewhere will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are allowed and encouraged, but make sure to formally withdraw your submission if it is accepted elsewhere prior to publication/acceptance in Folklore Review. To do so, visit the contact page and inform the editors of your wish to withdraw, including your name and the title of the piece(s) in question. 

Submit your work here.

Call for Poetry Submissions: Poet Lore

Poet Lore is a biannual print journal of poetry and translations. Published with the conviction that poetry provides a record of human experience as valuable as history, Poet Lore’s intended audience is broadly inclusive.

Established by Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke in 1889, Poet Lore is the nation’s oldest poetry journal. Poet Lore publishes a range of established and award winning poets such as Erika Meitner, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Terrance Hayes, Linda Pastan, Mary Oliver & Carl Philips, who share the space with emerging poets. Someone’s first published poem may stand alongside another author’s 100th.

We are committed to diversity and inclusivity and highly encourage submissions from marginalized voices. We do not tolerate racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, or any work that promotes harmful stereotypes and viewpoints.

In support of all of our contributors, we nominate select works each year for both The Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets.

Poet Lore pays contributors $50 per published poem. Due to the volume of poems we receive, our current response time is roughly 6-8 months. 

We accept general submissions twice a year: April 1 - May 31 and October 1 - November 30.

We are open to translation submissions from January 1 - June 30 and from August 1 - November 30.

Guest editor calls for submissions will be announced on our website and via social media prior to opening.

Submit here.

Call for Submissions: Adi Magazine

Adi is seeking new short fiction. Send us your unpublished work!

Adi is thinking about alternative political visions for a world in desperate need of them. We want examples from outside of the mainstream, stories about practices, ideas, and movements that were/are suppressed by economic, socio-cultural, religious, or imperial (colonial) powers. We privilege perspectives from the Global South, always interested in how we might reorient our political universe towards those organic alliances, intertwined liberation theologies, grassroots movements, and revolutionary philosophers. But we are also interested in the experiences of all marginalized peoples everywhere as they have explored alternative economies, subversive strategies, and surprising solidarities. Pieces could be based on historical events, or could focus on imagined futures that subvert current empires.

In the words of James Baldwin, "Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation."

What realignments, restorations, revisions and resurrections might we uncover and foster with the stars aflame?

Please interpret this call expansively and imaginatively. Familiarize yourself with the range and spirit of our archives; Adi tends toward creative, experimental approaches to political writing, measuring the effects of policy through the intimate lives and experiences of people with a particular focus on those on the margins and in the Global South. We’ve previously published fiction on ghosts in a post-fossil fuel world;intervention through the eyes of a fugitive lion; healthcare bureaucracy and restrictions on reproductive rights; the reimagination of the myth of the faceless woman; and a family's decision on citizenship while facing an American apocalypse. 

We do not want dreary political agitprop. We love work that bends genres, that embraces the absurd, that excavates interior lives alongside external conflicts. Send us work that analyzes, satirizes, fabulizes, and fantasizes, that disturbs, beguiles, moves, challenges, surprises, and ignites.

SUBMISSION LIMIT: 5,000 words. One unpublished submission per author, please.

For short fiction, up to 5,000 words, payment is $500.

For flash fiction, under 1,000 words, payment is $200.

The deadline for submissions is MAY 4th.

Translators: we’d love to hear from you, too! If you have unpublished work from writers who fit the bill, please get in touch. (If the story’s already been translated, just go ahead and submit, but if not, feel free to email us with a blurb about the potential story and we’ll take it from there).

Adi does not accept submissions generated with AI.

***

Adi is a feminist literary journal of global politics. Founded in 2019, we’ve published new work from such writers as Tracy K. Smith, Nadifa Mohamed, Meena Kandasamy, Evie Shockley, Terese Mailhot, K-Ming Chang, and Rafia Zakaria. Named after a Tamil word with three meanings—protest, intervention, and violence—Adi’s aim is to platform political writing rooted in lived experience and a commitment to inventiveness, both formally and conceptually.

 

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions: The Pink Hydra

For this year, The Pink Hydra is publishing on a quarterly schedule. We aim to release issues in June, September, and December 2025. Therefore, our open submission periods will be as follows:

The whole of April — for the June issue. Because our fundraiser was slightly delayed, April submissions are being extended until 10 May 2025.
The whole of July — for the September issue
The whole of October — for the December issue

If your story is rejected for the Magazine, please don’t submit it to our Ko-fi or Novella calls.

Submission guidelines for the magazine

Genre: The Pink Hydra publishes tales of unreality. That includes—but is not limited to—all stripes of speculative fiction. It also includes tales where no magic happens. It’s more of a vibe than a genre. Stories need to have a fantasy-feel, to transport the reader to some different world. This can include literary, romance, or even nonfiction memoir.

You can check out our past issues (all free!) or browse our list of authors to see what we’ve accepted in the past, but don’t use these as a form of self-rejection. One of the main things we’re looking for is diversity. We’ve already published a range of tones and styles, from the whimsical to the grimdark, the philosophical to the unapologetically pulp. We’ve published urban romance, sexy smut, space horror, sword-and-sorcery, backpack fantasy, queer fairytales, drug-addled whimsy, an absolute mess of poetry, and more. We try to publish what the higher-profile zines don’t, so if you’ve got something that doesn’t seem to fit, give us a try! Our Head Editor’s favourite stories and poems so far are listed on her website here. (Some of these might be NSFW, depending on where you work.)

Because of our online format, we are not the best venue for unusually formatted poetry (poems that rely on spacing and margins to reproduce a certain shape). We also generally prefer not to publish these types of poems. Other than that, any form of poetry is fine.

Content: We welcome extreme content and do not require content warnings. Sex and bad language are fine. We do publish erotica, and especially queer smut.

Length: Up to 30,000 words for short stories. No line limit for poetry. Flash fiction and microfiction welcome.

Simultaneous submissions: Allowed and welcome. Let us know at the submissions email if you need to withdraw a story.

Multiple submissions: For stories over 5,000 words, only submit one at a time. If you have a bunch of stories below 5,000 words, send any number as long as the total word count is no more than 5,000. For poetry, send up to 10 poems at a time. You may mix poetry and prose as long as the total submission is under 5,000 words or 10 standard letter pages. If you have an epic poem that’s over 10 pages long, we’d love to see it, but again, only one at a time. Send all you want us to consider in a single document attached to a single email.

For this year, we will only consider one submission per writer per open period, so please make sure that you have sent us everything in one email! Whether accepted or rejected, you’re welcome to send us another submission when we reopen.

Reprints: All rights we ask for are non-exclusive, so we accept reprints as well as works that are still available elsewhere. In your submission email, please indicate the publication history of your piece: where it was first published, whether it’s still in print or online, etc. We welcome stories that have been self-pubbed someplace like Tumblr or Medium, but we are a bit less likely to accept work that is available at another free webzine.

Formatting: Send your submission as a document that can be opened and edited in MS Word (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .odt). Do not mark it read-only. No PDFs, no links to your Google Drive, and please do NOT paste the text of your submission into the body of the email. Email all submissions to:

submissions@thepinkhydra.com 

Put ‘Submission’ in the subject line of your email. Use whatever font or line spacing appeals to you, and please indicate your byline (the name you want to publish under).

Cover letter: A formal cover letter is not required, but we’d love to hear who you are and where you’re from. Please treat the editorial team like people, because we are. You should know that a completely blank email comes off as rather rude, and on top of that blank emails are more likely to be dumped into spam folders.

As mentioned above, please tell us if you are sending a reprint. This isn’t so that we can secretly discriminate against your story, but because we look rather silly announcing that something is ‘first published at The Pink Hydra’ when it isn’t.

Submission Confirmation: You should receive an auto-reply from us within 72 hours confirming that we have received and queued your submission. If you haven’t received it, send your submission again. If it’s still not arriving, please urgently contact our Chief Editor at her personal email: emmyktz (at) gmail.com. Do not use this address for submissions; offenders will be demolished, hung, drawn and quartered, sent in pieces to each of the twelve tribes, and ignored.

Response time: We aim to reply to all submissions within a month of receipt. Because of our new quarterly publication schedule, we have to finalize our seclections for the next issue at the latest two weeks after the submission period closes. If you don’t hear from us by then, please get in touch.

Feedback: At The Pink Hydra, we generally don’t send form rejections. Often we will provide detailed critique on a rejected story, but even if we don’t, we always give a reason for rejection. If you’d rather not know the reason why, or if you’re not interested in feedback on your writing, please tell us.

Editing: All the material we publish at The Pink Hydra is rigorously edited with attention to errors, inconsistencies, language use, and style. We always require the writer’s approval of any changes before publication. Sometimes these edits go beyond simple grammar: we might ask to restructure sentences, change passive conversation to active, or fact-check your terminology. We consider editing to be a dialogue between editor and author, and welcome your input during this process.

Rights and payment: The Pink Hydra asks for worldwide, non-exclusive electronic distribution rights. We pay on acceptance, preferably via Paypal, but alternative arrangements can be made if necessary, especially if you are living in Africa. Our template contract is here.

For 2025, we are compensating writers with a base pay rate of 1 ZAR cent – about 1/18th of a U.S. cent – per word, with a minimum payment per contributor of R50. Payments made by Paypal are rounded up to the nearest dollar, to help cushion fees.

Effectively, this means that all stories and poetry contributions under 5,500 words will receive $3, with longer stories receiving more, up to a maximum of $17.

Re-Submissions: Sometimes, we will ask for rewrites of a story we liked but didn’t think was ready for publication. There are also stories that we would be open to considering at a later date, if substantial revisions are made. If you sent us a story last year and we asked you to re-submit, you are more than welcome to send the revised story again this year.

Illustrations

The Pink Hydra is looking for black-and-white cover art and illustrations, reprint or original. We’re open to any artistic style or genre, including photography, as long as it suits the vibe of the magazine. As with writing, erotic art and taboo subjects are welcome.

Guidelines: Email 1 to 10 art samples to:

submissions@thepinkhydra.com 

In your email, please indicate whether the pieces have been published by another market, and if so, when and where. (We don’t mind if you’ve posted the pieces on your own site or social media.) We are unlikely to purchase a piece which has been used as cover art for another online magazine. We offer R180 per piece for cover art, and R80 for interior art, rounded to the nearest dollar if paid by Paypal (effectively, $10 and $5). 

Simultaneous submissions are allowed.

Response: Your art submission will receive an auto-reply, to confirm that we have received it. We’ll get back to you within 60 days. You may submit illustrations and writing at the same time.

Novel excerpts

The Pink Hydra has the space to run a short novel excerpt in every issue. We often use these for self-promotion, but we’d like to feature any book our readers might be interested in. Because this excerpt is intended to function as a free advertisement, there is no payment.

Guidelines: Send an excerpt between 1,500 and 5,000 words to:

submissions@thepinkhydra.com 

In your cover letter, please include your penname and bio, a link for readers to find your novel, and a short blurb describing the overall plot. Excerpts do not have to stand alone – ideally, they should make the reader want to head on over to your book to read the rest! The novel must be available to buy or pre-order – no works-in-progress! Free novels, of course, are welcome too. You’ll receive a response from us within 30 days.

Don’t: send us AI work (ugh) or stuff that you otherwise don’t hold the copyright to, like fanfiction (characters who are in the public domain, like Dracula, Odin, or Alice in Wonderland, don’t count as fanfic). Don’t send us things if you’re under 18.

The Pink Hydra is a proudly nerdy, female-led, sex-positive, queer-friendly, international, young publication. We hate fascism and oppression in all their various forms, and we won’t accept work that we view as imperialist, discriminatory, or anti-sex. Take your Nazi fanfic, MRA manifestos, and rants about the evil Chinese elsewhere. You may also be tempted to send us ‘stories’ that make fun of bullied kids, rape victims, refugees, the mentally ill, or other vulnerable classes of people. Don’t.

The Pink Hydra accepts submissions from all crevices of the globe, from New York to Nairobi, Berlin to Bombay, Mississippi to Maseru. We will consider all submissions on their own merits, but we are particularly interested in stories by and about women (including trans women), stories that take place somewhere that isn’t Everyman City, and all things LGBTQ+ and (gender)queer.

Send us your stuff, your art! Don’t self-reject!