Call for Submissions: Kestrel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kestrel publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by established and emerging writers. We are especially happy to publish work by West Virginia and Appalachian writers. Kestrel features reviews and visual art in each issue.

Kestrel is now accepting submissions year-round. Submissions are only accepted through Submittable.

Poetry: Kestrel welcomes poems of all genres, styles, and traditions, including experimental and hybrid forms, as well as poetry in translation. Send 3-5 of your best poems during one of our reading periods.

Poetry in Translation: Submissions of poetry in translation are encouraged. We prefer to publish bilingual translations (on facing pages), and we require clear permission from the original poet for the translation and for printing their work in the original (unless the work is in the public domain).

Fiction: Kestrel is open to any genre of short fiction that questions assumptions and moves us to reconsider everyday life. We enjoy stories with believable plots, developed characters, consistent points-of-view, vivid and symbolic settings, true dialogue, and thought-provoking themes, though we also enjoy experimental writing that makes new the expected conventions. 5,000 words maximum.

Non-Fiction: Creative nonfiction, memoir, or literary essays are preferred. Subject matter may vary but attention to writing as craft and art is paramount; the attention to diction, syntax, and detail should delight and surprise. We appreciate writing that makes a subject's complexity understandable and its familiarity new. We expect non-fiction to be non-fiction.

Reviews: Please query via email. See featured reviews at:

www.fairmontstate.edu/kestrel

Visual Art: Submissions to Kestrel may be made in any medium. Image resolution should be at least 300 dpi and in .jpg format. We publish full-color and black and white images. Kestrel may use images for publicity purposes.

Wrongfully Neglected: Kestrel invites recommendations, reflections, and reviews of individual texts (poems, short stories, essays) or books that fall outside the conventional guidelines for reviews, in terms of publication age (typically under 2 years), length (500 words and up), and voice. We would like to read pieces that show our readers why overlooked or forgotten literature published more than 2 years ago should be hunted down and read (or reread) immediately. Form and formality may vary, but writing must be vivid and engaging. Length should exceed a typical blurb but stop by the end of a Kestrel page (about 750 words). Submissions that do not meet these guidelines will be declined.

Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Kestrel retains first North American rights only. Contributors receive one copy and a one year subscription. Address your submission to the appropriate editor (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual art). Simultaneous submissions are accepted; immediate notification of a manuscript accepted elsewhere is expected.

Note: For submissions received January-May and August-November, allow six months for our response before inquiring. Restrict submissions to one per calendar year.

All accepted work is for the print publication; select work may be featured on our website. Kestrel submits each issue to Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Vox Populi, and, therefore, work published in Kestrel may be chosen for reprint in those venues.

Submittable is our only method for submissions.

Writing Competition: The Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Writers

The Catamaran Poetry Prize encourages the submission of previously unpublished poetry manuscripts across a range of styles, themes, and forms. This contest is for a book length collection of poetry only. Manuscripts of fiction, creative nonfiction, translations, or screenplays are ineligible. The prize is only open to West Coast poets living in California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii. All submissions should be written in English.

A prize of $1,000 will and publication in book form will be awarded to poet for the winning poetry collection selected by the judge for publication.

All poets who have entered their manuscript in the contest will receive a complimentary, one-year subscription to our literary journal Catamaran.

Submissions must be received between February 15, 2026 and July 1, 2026 in order to be considered for publication. No late submissions will be accepted.

Manuscripts must be typed, paginated, and between 60-100 pages in length. Poems in the collection must be the original work of the author and previously unpublished in a book length collection. Poems can be published previously in print magazines or online journals. Publication acknowledgments should be included for previously published work. Please ensure all included quotations are clearly attributed to the author.

Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions are acceptable. Please send us an email at editor@catamaranliteraryreader.com and let us know immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

Submissions will be read blind, without identification of the author, so please remove your name from the title page and content of the manuscript itself. Because the reviews will be made blind, former students of the judge are not disqualified. Previous manuscript submissions to a prior contest are also not disqualified, and may be entered again.

Revisions are not allowed to the manuscript after it has been submitted to the contest. However, the winning poet will have time to revise the collection before publication. Catamaran reserves the right to get approval from the judge if revisions are significant.

If our staff encounters any difficulties in processing your submission we will contact you to obtain a correction. Minor errors in your submission (spelling, formatting, typographic errors) do not affect your chance of winning.

The winner will be announced on the Catamaran website in September, 2026, and we expect to publish the winning collection in January 2026. We will also announce the names of finalists and semifinalists in September 2026 on our website. We will send a Submittable notification of the manuscripts selected as winner and finalists in September, 2026.

Reminder: this is a BLIND submission. Please remove your name from all pages of the manuscript, including from the title page. Manuscripts with identifying information will be "opened for editing" and not entered into the contest until the poet removes identifying information from all pages. Do not include names of people you would like to thank and acknowledge in your submission. These types of acknowledgements can be included and published with the winning manuscript.

Catamaran will host a book launch event and reading in December 2025. The book will also be entered for publication awards.

This year's judge is Joseph Millar. 

Submit your entry here.

Entry Fee: $45.00 (Includes subscription to Catamaran and a copy of the winning poetry collection.)

Call for Submissions: Public School Poetry

Public School Poetry publishes two online issues each year: a Back-to-School Issue in September, and a Spring Break Issue in April. Please note that while we invoke public school tropes for the identity of this journal, we are not asking for school-specific poems or student-specific submitters. Please read the guidelines below and then send us work you’re passionate to share with us!

We have two reading periods each year:

October 15th - December 1st

April 15th - June 1st

Submit 4-6 unpublished poems in one file that does not exceed ten pages to our Submittable account. When you get to Submittable, you will also be asked to fill out a brief enrollment form instead of a letter. The enrollment form is primarily our checkpoint that you know what we're about and really want to be a part of it.

​Poets selected will be published under the condition that they write “a five-paragraph essay” (300-600'ish words) on a fellow contributor’s poem packet for the issue. Contributors are randomly and anonymously assigned their packet by the Public School Poetry Vice Principals shortly after being accepted to the issue. This exchange is a vital part of our mission to democratize craft talk and poetry engagement.

We ask that these "five-paragraph essays" engage explicitly with the poems in order to guide our readers back to them with renewed/different understanding. We encourage contributors to consider the “five-paragraph essay” as a structure to play with/use in much the same way you might approach a sonnet or an ekphrasis. Essays can be as lyrical or analytical as you like as long as there’s five parts/units/paragraphs. Contributors are not obligated to address every poem and we won’t edit your essay or ask for revisions as long as it does this work and follows our school spirit guidelines:

• We are here to lift each other up, not put each other in trash cans

• We love questions and paradoxes, and we value insight over criticism

• We are generous to styles, subjects, tones, forms, and aesthetics that differ from our own our own

We only have room to publish a handful of writers. If your pieces aren’t selected, please know we still read them with care and are cheering you on from the bleachers. If your pieces are selected, please note that you are agreeing to give Public School Poetry first serial publication rights. After publication, all rights revert back to you, the author. 

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions: The Journal of Compressed Arts

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts is looking for, as you might guess, “compressed creative arts.” We accept fiction and creative nonfiction, as long as they are compressed in some way. Work is published weekly, without labels, and the labels here only exist to help us determine its best readers. Our response time is generally 1-5 days. Also, our acceptance rate is currently about 2% of submissions.

We pay writers $50 per accepted piece and signed contract.

Submissions are open from March 15 to June 15 and September 15 to December 15.

If you’ve been previously published by the press, please wait a year until submitting again. Thanks.

Here are a baker’s dozen of things Matter Press definitely doesn’t want:

• conversations in bars, cafes, restaurants, cars, hikes, or in some unexplained space where disembodied voices think they are way more interesting and clever than they are

• anything written “after.” Nothing in conversation with, inspired by, or an homage to a preceding poem, artwork, or other text. Before is okay.

• line break poetry or poetry written as prose with / between the lines where the line break would be

• Pieces “after” the action, so that the protagonist does nothing except moments of glancing, thinking, reflecting, noticing, sitting, wondering, brushing, dreaming…

• odd names of characters like Friglep or Zueron or Noir or anything that isn’t a name

• a strange writing pseudonym that is a bunch of senseless letters strung together

• the heading on a piece that still has the name of the writing teacher, English teacher, professor—along with the name of the class

• yeah, the world is awful, the president is awful, the climate is awful, ICE is awful. It’s all awful. We know. No need to tell us. We 100% get it.

• second-person stories. You can send such a story to your other favorite literary magazines; you do not need to send it here.

• pieces that assume we will automatically care about your piece because you wrote it. We won’t. The piece needs to make us care. And pretty quickly. There are 100s of pieces in the slush pile. We aren’t a writing workshop that has no choice but to read each piece carefully and closely and lovingly because everyone knows everyone. We have choices. Hundreds of them.

• the appearance of Jesus, God, or any holy being

• writing about writing

• any questions about the above

The reader for your submission is, during this round of submissions, the managing editor.

Please be sure to submit in the correct category; we’ve been receiving several fiction submissions in the creative nonfiction category. For all submitters, we aren’t as concerned with labels—hint fiction, prose poetry, micro fiction, flash fiction, and so on—as we are with what compression means to you. In other words, what form “compression” takes in each artist’s work will be up to each individual. However, we don’t publish erotica or work with strong, graphic sexual content. In short, we want to fall in love with your work. That might happen in the way we’ve fallen in love with work we’ve previously published, or it might happen in a way we have yet to experience. Maybe reading that other work will help in knowing whether you should send your work to us, but in truth, such a thing might not be discoverable. Here are things that matter:

Please do not include a cover letter as part of the manuscript document.

Please include, as part of your cover letter on Submittable, a brief bio. Also, in the cover letter, let us know why you feel this piece works for a journal obsessed with “compression.”

Please no more than one submission of a single piece in each genre at a time. Please feel free to submit again after receiving a response, but please no more than 3 submissions per genre per reading period.

Simultaneous submissions are fine with us, but please let us know if the submission has been accepted elsewhere. Failure to do will result in some facsimile of your face being put on the Matter dart board. And no one wants that.

Please format prose to be singled-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, in a Microsoft Word document, with an extra space between each paragraph.

If you’ve been previously published by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, please wait a year before submitting again.

Submit your work here. 

Call for Nonfiction Submissions: Tolka Journal

Tolka 

Submissions are now open until midnight 31 May.

Please read through our submission guidelines before submitting.

Submission guidelines

We publish all forms of non-fiction: personal essay, memoir, reportage, travel writing, auto-fiction, and the writing that falls in between.

Our guideline word count for work is 1,000–3,000 words.

All submissions should be previously unpublished.

Submissions should be in one .doc, .docx or PDF attachment and double-spaced.

We are happy to consider simultaneous submissions but ask that you notify us should your work be accepted elsewhere.

We offer contributors a flat fee of ‎‎€600, which we pay prior to publication. Contributors also receive a copy of the issue in which their work is featured, and are invited to read at our launch.

We only accept submissions through our website.

We publish work by Irish and international writers.

For practical and economic reasons, we discourage the use of images unless integral to a piece of writing.

We encourage submissions from writers who are underrepresented in the arts, due to their socio-economic background, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age or disability.

All submissions will be closely read but, due to the volume of submissions, we are unable to offer individual feedback. We aim to provide a response within three months of the submission closing date.

We strongly advise familiarising yourself with the kind of writing we publish before submitting. We are always open to new ventures.

Submissions must be original work and cannot infringe upon the right or copyright of any person or entity. We do not publish AI-generated work, unless explicitly created for artistic purposes, and clearly framed as such.

Copyright remains, in all cases, the property of the author.

After you make your submission, you will see a message of confirmation, but you will not receive a confirmation email.

Submit your work here. 

Writing Competition: The 2027 International Voices in Creative Nonfiction Competition: Vine Leaves Press

The 2027 International Voices in Creative Nonfiction Competition is now open for submissions.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Eligibility:

The competition is open to writers worldwide.

Submissions must be in English and unpublished (that includes self-published). Submissions written by AI will be disqualified.

VLP authors and staff are not eligible to enter.

We welcome submissions from marginalized voices including, but not limited to:

Age
BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)
Body positivity
Chronic illness
LatinX
LGBTQ+
Neurodivergent
People living with disabilities (intellectual and physical)
People living with HIV
People with a history of incarceration
Sex workers
Undocumented people
Unhoused people
Women 

2. Next Submission Period:Submissions open on February 1, 2026.
Submissions close on July 1, 2026, at 11:59 PM (UTC+2).

3. Submission Process:Submit your creative nonfiction manuscript via Submittable.
Each submission requires a $28 entry fee, payable through Submittable.

4. Formatting Guidelines:

If the manuscript is narrative in nature (i.e. a memoir) then the length should be between 50,000 – 80,000 words, give or take within reason.

If the manuscript is experimental in nature (i.e. not straight prose, could be vignettes, poetry, or a mix), it should be at least 100 pages long.

Submissions must be in a standard font (e.g., Times New Roman) and size (12pt), double-spaced.
Include the title of your manuscript at the beginning.

5. Anonymity:
Please ensure that your submission does not contain any biographical information on the front. PLEASE NOTE: There is no need to be anonymous in your actual manuscript (it's nonfiction!). We just don't want it to be obvious for the initial selection process so we can be certain that our readers aren't swayed by the demographics of the author before they start reading.

6. Multiple Entries:
You may submit multiple entries to the competition, each requiring a separate entry fee.

7. Judging Process:Judges will assess entries based on originality, creativity, writing quality, and adherence to the genre.

The judging process is blind (as it can possibly be, since it's nonfiction), ensuring impartiality and fairness.

​8. Notification Timeline:

Longlist: October 2026
Shortlist: December 2026
Winner: January 2027

9. Prizes:

The winner will receive a cash prize of $1000.
Publication of the winning manuscript will occur in 2028 by Vine Leaves Press.
Runners up will also be considered for publication.

10. Rights:
By submitting your work, you grant Vine Leaves Press the right to publish your manuscript in print and digital formats.

11. Questions:
For any inquiries regarding the competition or submission process, please contact us at:

info@vineleavespress.com

12. Legal Notice:
Vine Leaves Press reserves the right to amend any guidelines or dates related to the competition if necessary.

Writing Competition: Terrain.org

 

Terrain.org

More than $5,000 in prizes! $1,000 grand prize in each genre and $200 to finalists.

Deadline: September 7, 2026

We accept contest submissions from May 1 to U.S. Labor Day. The deadline for our 16th Annual Contest is September 7, 2026, for publication in February and March 2027.

How to Submit

We do not accept submissions created by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

You are not eligible to enter this contest if you are a current student of the contest judges or if you have been a winner in the contest in the last five years. Finalists are welcome to submit again.

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but previously published material in any format, including blogs or social media, will not be considered. Submissions can be withdrawn through the submission system, though in that case contest entry fees will not be refunded. Individual components of submissions (i.e., a single poem in a poem set) may be withdrawn by sending a message through Submittable.

Cost

The cost to submit is $20 per story, essay or article, or set of 1-5 poems.

What to Submit

You may submit up to three entries (at $20/entry) in any or all genres:

Poetry
Submit 1-5 poems per entry. Combine all poems into a single document. For poetry, we are seeking the single best poem or set of poems. The entire submission must not exceed 7 pages. Poems must contain only the poem title(s) and poem(s) without the author name or contact information (including in the document header/footer).

Fiction
Submit one story, up to 5,000 words total, or up to 2 flash fictions, up to 1,000 words each, per entry. Stories must contain only the story title and story itself without the author name or contact information (including in the document header/footer).

Nonfiction
Submit one essay or article, up to 5,000 words total, or up to 2 flash essays, up to 1,000 words each, per entry. Essays must contain only the essay title and essay itself without the author name or contact information (including in the document header/footer). We will consider all nonfiction, but are most interested in creative nonfiction, including personal essays, lyric essays, memoir, literary journalism, and other literary forms.

The Submission Process

Submissions and payment for the 15th Annual Contest are conducted on our Submittable site.

Submit from May 1 – September 7!