Call for Submissions: The Baltimore Review

Please review the editors' preferences and tips to writers. We may not be able to completely pin down what we want—and we do want to be taken pleasantly by surprise—but you may find the quotes helpful. And please take a little time to check out our blog and to read some of the work in our current and past issues.

What to put in that Cover Letter box: When you submit your work, please include a brief bio to introduce yourself. Generally, a "thank you for considering my work" and a brief bio similar to those on our website is all that's needed. Note that for contest submissions, that information is concealed.

If your work is accepted for publication, we ask only for the right to publish it for the first time, online and in print. Please do not submit work that has been accepted for publication elsewhere. All rights revert to the author after publication by The Baltimore Review. All accepted work will be archived on the website.

We accept submissions only through our submission link. We do not consider emailed submissions or submissions sent through the postal service. Every poem, short story, and work of creative nonfiction we accept is selected from the Submittable queue based on merit and the needs of the journal.

Submissions in more than one category are permitted, but please do not submit work more than once per reading period in any category.

Among other resources for writers, NewPages.com has a Publications for Young Writers page. We encourage teen (and younger) writers to review this list before submitting work to literary journals. The Baltimore Review considers submissions from writers who are 18 years of age or older.

Simultaneous submissions are absolutely fine. If you need to withdraw your work, or part of your work, from consideration, let us know. Use the Withdraw option if withdrawing the entire submission; send us a message through Submittable if withdrawing part of your submission, e.g., one poem from a group of three.

Once your work has been accepted by a publication, always withdraw it from any other publications right away.

Our next submission period is August 1 through November 30, 2025.

Please do not withdraw and re-submit your work if making revisions. Simply note the minor edit or, if the changes are more extensive, attach the new version in the Submittable message. But it’s always best, of course, to take some time to thoroughly proofread your work before submitting. Thanks.

Response time: You will be notified of our decision within four months. We're aiming for a response time well within that time frame, usually one to three months, but we do receive thousands of submissions in each submission period, and we read each one of them. Thank you for your patience.

Fees: We do not charge fees for non-contest submissions and have no plans to do so in the future. We charge a modest $8 fee for contest submissions.

Payment for non-contest submissions is $50 via Amazon gift certificate or $50 through PayPal, if preferred, as well as a copy of the annual print compilation in which the author's work appears. We hope to continue this as long as funding is available. We also nominate our contributors' work for every possible prize.

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions: Locust Shells Journal

 

Our submissions are simple.

1 submission per reading period.

Use the Submission Form only.

12 pt font of your choosing.

No previously published.

Leave it all on the page.

Deadline: Aug. 31, 2025

Submission Fee: $2.00

Why $2

We want to pay our contributors. After processing fees, we will receive approximately $1.50 for each submission. At the end of each submission period we will divide the total amount received in half. 50% keeps our website running. The other 50% will be distributed equally among all contributors via PayPal.

That’s it. 

Submission form here. 

Call for Submissions: Pinyon

We are interested in previously unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Examples can be found on our Issues page, but our best advice to those wishing to be published with us is to get a copy and become familiar with PINYON.

See Subscriptions here to obtain a sample copy!

Our reading period is August 1 to December 1. Submissions received outside this time frame will be returned unread. We respond in February and publish early summer.

We appreciate pieces with a clear voice, strong vision, and are open to experimental fiction. There are no restrictions on subject or style, although all work must be original, unpublished, and written in English (or include a translation into English). Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if they are identified as such, and the author agrees to notify us immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere.

Please include a brief cover letter with each submission. Submissions can contain up to 5 poems or up to a 10,000 word limit for prose. Pieces may be submitted either electronically through Submittable or through postal mail. When submitting electronically, please include all of your pieces in one .doc or .docx file with no more than one poem per document page. Include your contact information on each page of your submission. If you would like the hard copy of your piece returned, provide a S.A.S.E. If your work is not selected one year and you would like it considered for future editions, please resubmit during the next reading period.

Additionally, Pinyon has no submission fee.

For postal submissions, use the following address:

PINYON

Languages, Literature, and Mass Communication

Colorado Mesa University

1100 North Avenue

Grand Junction, CO 81501-3122

 

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions on Theme of "Hunger": Feels Zine

Interested in being a Feels contributor? Fantastic!

We are currently accepting submissions for Issue 25: Hunger

Submission deadline: August 31, 2025 at 11:59pm

Published: January 2026

MISSION STATEMENT

Food can make us feel so many things: euphoria; disgust; curious; at home. What are our personal and cultural connections to food? How do we share it, value it, connect to it, and enjoy it? How has our relationship to it evolved over time, within families, and within communities? In Issue 25, we indulge in its goodness, respect its significance, and dive into its complexity (both literally and figuratively).

Please send all submissions to:

submittofeels@gmail.com 

with a short bio and description of your work.

We accept:

Writing: poetry, personal essays, fictional stories, interview proposals.

Visual Art: photography, illustration, art, typography.

Have an idea for a submission not listed above? Send us an email with your proposal, we’re eager to read it.

Before submitting, please read our COMMUNITY GUIDELINES.

We welcome (and encourage) people of all diverse experiences, abilities and communities to submit their work. Your voice is important, and we would like to support it. The more voices we hear, the more we can learn from one another.

Keep up to date by following us on Instagram & Facebook or signing up for our newsletter.

Submission Guidelines

1. Please title your email submissions using the following: "FEELS Submission - Issue ___ - [Your name as it should appear in the issue if accepted] - Title of Submission"

2. If submitting a collection of works, please submit all in one email with the name of the collection as the title.

3. If submitting multiple separate works for the same issue, please submit each individually.

4. Art submissions: FEELS is 6.5" x 9.5" with a 0.125" bleed. Please be advised that we may ask you to recolour your artwork for risograph.

5. Longform written submissions: the maximum word count for submissions is 1200 words. Please submit as a word document or using Google Docs.

6. A short bio about yourself and description of your work, including the country you are submitting from, as we publish a majority Canadian content as a Canadian publication, but do include global contributors as well.

Please send all submissions to:

submittofeels@gmail.com 

If you do not receive a reply to your email confirming it has reached us, please follow up with our main email:

hellofeelszine@gmail.com.

We accept previously published work, as long as it will not be published in another Canadian independent magazine during the chosen issue's publication period (January-July or July-January). We don't want to step on anyone's toes by printing the same material at the same time. We can include attribution if the publication requires it.

We kindly request submissions are limited to one or two works due to the high volume of submissions we receive, and please have patience with us in responding to new emails--we promise to reply to each and every one.

Writing Competition: 35th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize

 

35th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize
$5,000 Fiction | $5,000 Nonfiction | $5,000 Poetry

Winners receive publication, promotion, and a cash prize.

Every entry is considered for publication. Winners will be announced in early 2026.

Contest Deadline: October 1, 2025 

Guidelines

• Submit one piece of fiction or nonfiction up to 8,500 words or any number of poems between 6 to 12 pages. Please double-space fiction and nonfiction entries.

• Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are welcome, but you must pay a separate fee for each entry and withdraw the piece immediately if accepted elsewhere.

• Entries must be previously unpublished.

• Standard Entry fee: $25. Each entrant receives a one-year subscription to the Missouri Review in digital format (normal price $24) and a digital copy of the latest title in our imprint, Missouri Review Books, a short story anthology by former contributors (normal price $7.95).

• “All Access” Entry fee: $30. In addition to the one-year digital subscription to the Missouri Review and TMR Books e-book, the Life Support: Stories of Health & Medicine, entry fee grants access to the last 10 years of digital issues and the audio recordings of each digital issue.

• Eligibility Previous winners of the Editors’ Prize and current University of Missouri students and faculty are ineligible.

• Previous Editors’ Prize finalists are welcome to enter again.

Submit

Online
By Mail

Questions? E-mail:

contest_question@moreview.com

Writing Competition: Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for poems in the surrealist tradition and its many iterations. One of the basic tenants of surrealism is a revolt of the imagination against reason, rationalism, and empiricism. The first surrealist movement is marked by the publication of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. It is, as Robert Bly describes in discussion of Spanish surrealist poets, the poetry of “wild association” and “leaping.”

Melissa Kwasny writes the following useful definition of surrealism from her book Earth Recitals: Essasy on Image and Vision:

“Surrealism, with its emphasis on images drawn from dreams, the wildness of chance, and unconscious desire, extended our definition of the real by opening the conscious mind to realms of perceptions hitherto unknown or agreed upon . . . Breton states in his Second Manifesto [that surrealism is] “a total recovery of our psychic force.” . . . The images that washed up on the shores of the surrealist poem were recognizably different, strange and incoherent . . . Offshoots of French surrealism include the Latin American surrealism of Pablo Neruda a precursor of magic realism; the post-colonial surrealism of the Caribbean poets like Aime Cesaire; Lorca’s dark Andalusian rendition of the Deep Song; the American Deep image poets, influenced by Neruda, as well by Robert Bly’s translations of Transtromer and Rilke . . . and later, poets of the Beat era, collage poets, poets exploring the arrangement of images in non-narrative, disjunctive and, to borrow a word from the surrealists, convulsive ways all influenced by the freedom to go beyond the boundaries of the concrete for images. The image, as fragment, or rather, as discontinuous accumulation of fragments, bound by chance encounters in dreams and waking life, gave us a glimpse into an entirely different way of envisioning our world.”

We seek any contemporary poem born of these traditions in an attempt to identify and keep alive the many changing faces of the movement.

Deadline: October 1, 2025 

Prize: $1000 

Judge: Michael McGriff

Guidelines

• Fee: $15

• Submit a packet of up to three poems in one file.

• Please do not include identifying information in your submission document. We will use your Submittable information to contact you, so please make sure your contact information is accurate and up to date.

• Multiple submissions are welcome, as are simultaneous submissions. Please notify us immediately if your submission is accepted elsewhere.

• We accept only previously unpublished work for publication.

• We may consider any submission for general publication, unless the author states otherwise.

• Runners up may receive acknowledgment in the print issue, and online publication (if desired).

Submit your entry here.

Call for Submissions on Theme of "Voice": The Branches

 

Fall 2025 theme: VOICE

DEADLINE: September 13, 2025

Seeking submissions of previously unpublished written and visual work. We are especially interested in cultural criticism, personal essays, and book/movie discussions and also publish poetry, short fiction, art, and photography.

We recommend reading some of our previous issues (available free online) to get a feel for what we publish. Give us your big ideas and small thoughts, the ways you’re interacting with and understanding the world. We love Joan Didion, C. S. Lewis, Ada Limón, Susan Sontag, Flannery O’Connor, Patti Smith, and (hopefully) you!

Prose: 1500 word maximum

Poetry/Art: 4 piece maximum

If submitting multiple pieces, please include each as a separate document.

Do not submit work created with the use of generative AI or similar tools.

Have a response to one of the pieces we’ve published previously? Submit a letter to the editor.

Submit your work here.