Eyes Forward: Avant-Garde Literature and Literary Journals in 2020

Eyes Forward: Avant-Garde Literature and Literary Journals in 2020

So I was submitting some avant-garde poetry the other d—wait! Don’t go! Polarization is kind of a built-in feature of experimental or ‘new’ literature, so not everyone will be needing the second half of this article—The Big List, a compendium of journals that currently publish avant-garde writing to some extent—however this first bit may be, hopefully, a little insightful about writing that isn’t your cup of tea. Or maybe not. But I’ll be using a lot of other people’s words, so I have that going for me.

There is a very specific image conjured by the term ‘avant-garde writer' or 'experimental poet’, and it very much looks like someone that would say this:

“Reading experimental poetry is like listening to impromptu freestyle jazz—the good kind that you only hear late at night at jazz clubs or during a musician’s private practice sessions. The words are original, daring and sometimes stunning.” -Ann Yu Huang[1]

And you know why that’s the cliche? Because, for one, it is absolutely apt. Nothing in this quote is ‘wrong’ or a bad way of looking at experimental writing, it’s just a familiar vision because the Beats are very much the zeitgeist for experimental literature still. They blew up like you never thought they would. (Call City Light Bookstore[2], same number, same neighborhood[3]). 

So, because that’s the familiar imagery it’s easy to take it as an image, a surface level short-hand about the ‘types’ that write experimental literature. Whereas what Huang is getting at, is that when we think of poetry we think of words being honed down to perfection as opposed to taking the risks that an improvisation does, without risking the discordant, the strange,the narrow meandering sidetrack in their pursuit of communicating whatever idea or feeling they’re trying to convey—whatever the intended reaction of their piece. 

Old Sammy Coleridge’s adage still rings loudly in the ears of readers from almost 200 years ago “the definition of good Prose is—proper words in their proper places;—of good Verse—the most proper words in their proper places”

That is the exact quote (which is actually more nuanced in its context[4], but who has the time?), though most people modernize “most proper” to “best” when quoting it. And the best/best requirement disallows the sort of burrs and ‘imperfections’ that experimentation might throw into the mix regardless of results or authorial intention. But—defining poetry isn’t my intention here, that is a whoooooooole different tub of wax worms. Let’s just say, literature—writing with the intention of conveying some sort of information, is all in the same family of communication. The formatting and tropes that make a screenplay a screenplay and not a novel can very well be adopted by a novel with the intention of exploring the idea of reading a screenplay. An example would be the popular novel Me and Earl and the Dying Girl which has entire chapters that are in screenplay format. While it was a very popular novel in the mainstream, it used an experimental trope of using its language in a way atypical of its genre to an intended end. To that end dialogue frequently appears in poetry, free verse kicks the twin shackles of meter and rhyme, while prose poetry eschews line breaks.

So with the context of writing being all one big spectrum of overlapping genres, blah blah blah, we can break down what we mean by “experimental literature” which I’m using, for this article’s purposes, interchangeably with “avant-garde” "innovative writing", "hybrid genre" "post-genre" and “new writing.” I’m going to lean heavily on what others have said, because I’m not 100% dedicated to the scholarship of avant-garde, I’m more of a casual (if enthusiastic) pursuant of the new[5]. I very much enjoy innovating and reading the innovations of others, but I also just as much like to read and compose along a more traditional approach[6] to writing as long as there is something interesting and surprising being said. Form matching content and all that.

Also, defining things is a messy job when it comes to classifying literature within their own genre, specifically classifying the “experimental”—as Supreme Court Justice Stewart described obscenity: “I know it when I see it” is the easiest way to describe experimental literature, but that isn’t very helpful. There are always exceptions to anything you might say, and anyone that wants to engage in bad faith can pick apart any definition or categorization with outliers. 

So, good faith, right everyone? We’re all here to enjoy literature, and when we make generalizations we do so with full understanding that there are many exceptions to any ‘rule’ or ‘guideline’ we might put out into the world. I think I have PTSD from past poetry arguments that were intended to be conversions—that’s the only excuse I have for all of this hedging. Poetry’s serious business, people, I understand and agree. But it doesn’t have to make you angry. 

Anyway, Map Literary[7] defined Experimental Fiction as the following:

“Fiction that radically tests the predominant norms of realism (e.g., coherent characters, sequential/logical ordering of events, believable situations, recognizable settings, conventional syntax, readily comprehensible style, stable/consistent point of view, real-world verisimilitude, common sense) whether through structural, stylistic or thematic innovations, including the use of non-sequitur, parataxis, collage, absurd situations, anti-heroes/heroines, ironic bathos, cut-up techniques, stream-of-consciousness, hybrid discourse, genre mashing, alternate cultures, hyperbole, unconventional syntax, fragmented narration, or metafiction; generally related to the literary movements of Dada, Surrealism, Literature of the Absurd, Le Nouveau Roman, Oulipo, magic realism, speculative fiction, fabulist fiction, bizarro fiction. Experimental fiction undermines traditional conceptual categories by which we understand and navigate the world; it is adamant in its belief that the universe has not yet been satisfactorily explained; it makes readers feel as if they were disintegrating….

Experimental fiction is… a lot. And in many ways. But before I move on to poetry I just wanted to relate a little incident at a journal that championed experimental fiction—and still does (it’s in the list)—which suffered the wrath of those who considered something published there not only to be not worthy of being printed, but to be utterly offensive. 

The year, 1958. 

The journal, The Chicago Review. 

The outrage-inducing piece: an excerpt (the second chapter) from William Burroughs’ experimental novel Naked Lunch (mostly, the issue also included pieces from Brother Antoninus, Phillip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg). 

While the publication seemed to go fine, and the editors had already chosen pieces for the next issue, a Chicago Daily News columnist became apoplectic about the issue and published “FILTHY WRITING ON THE MIDWAY” as his front cover column. In it, Jack Mabley ranted “A magazine published by the University of Chicago is publishing one of the foulest collections of printed filth I've seen publicly circulated. . . The obscenity is put into their writing to attract attention. It is an assertion of their sense of bravado, 'boy, look what I'm doing' just like the little kids chalking a four-letter verb on the Oak Street underpass” and strongly suggested that “The trustees should take a long hard look at what is being circulated under their sponsorship.” 

The University of Chicago’s chancellor indeed called upon the trustees and demanded the next issue of The Chicago Review was scrapped and replaced with something quote: “completely innocuous”. All but one of the editorial staff resigned, the scrapped issue of The Chicago Review became the first issue of Big Table, and subsequently, the former CR, and new Big Table editors Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal were found guilty of distributing obscene material through the mail when they sent that first issue out. The judicial officer of the USPOD called the writing “undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit”.[8][9][10]  

The avant-garde has often been accused of obscenity. EE Cummings was jailed for obscene letters while in the army and then later almost had poems withheld from publication over fear of censorship over lines as lewd and lascivious as “slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz / of your electric furr” and “When we grimly go to bed / with these legs she begins to heave and twine / about me,and to kiss my face and head.”[11]  

Not exactly “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”NSFEEC. But more on Cummings later.

And before you get the wrong idea, the avant-garde isn’t all sex and swear words—it is about pushing against all sensibilities. When I fell in love with Langston Hughes’ transformative collection Montage of a Dream Deferred, I wasn’t aware of just how revolutionary his jazz verse was, because while it was avant-garde at the time, it was so successful that many of the conceits he broke from traditional verse to make were adopted by the mainstream. As Maryse Meijer remarked: 

“We tend to forget that there has always been work that plays with form, style, content; work that is modernist before the modern era, or postmodernist before the postmodern age, or avant-garde ahead of its time. Work that anticipates modes and subjects and ideas and structures that would be put to use ubiquitously decades later.”[12]

However, I’m not here to talk about me, I’ll get all self-indulgent another time soon about how I didn’t even realize I was developing a love of the avant-garde until it was too late, and looking back there were red flags everywhere[I almost did it but no]—let’s move along, there’s a ridiculously long list to get to[13] (quite the reminder that experimentation is alive and well in today’s marketplace of ideas). 

There’s a whole world of avant-garde nonfiction I’m unfortunately not qualified to speak on so I’ll just reiterate experimental nonfictioneer and former professor of mine, David Shields, who said of the line between fiction and nonfiction: 

“Composition is a fiction-making operation.”[15]

So, any nonfiction prose experiment will have a lot in common with fiction prose experiments when it comes to… well, dang near everything. 

Onto poetry! 

I got a lot of guff in graduate school when I proposed a spectrum of accessibility among the “Ultra Talk” poets[16], but I’m sticking by it. In retrospect, I think the main complaint always arises when you try to name things. Some artists loathe categorization, but I think when it’s done with the understanding that it is done loosely, with acknowledgment of exceptions, categorizations can be very helpful. Deep breath guys, I’m going in.

Poetry is a spectrum, and like all of literature and so much else that we’re talking about, each poem can be placed on a graph in an inexact place, and we can categorize those poems on that graph based on being extremely accessible/understandable or ‘traditional’ on one side of the spectrum, and extremely elliptical/occluded or ‘academic’ on the other side. Remember how I said that people hate names? Please don’t get bogged down in the semantics here. We are talking generalities, and each reader is their own special snowflake and yadda yadda yadda. Here. ELI5 Experimental Poetry, and again, all of literature, as I understand it:

Think of the spectrum of traditional and experimental poetry like a water faucet—traditional being the cold tap and experimental the hot tap. There’s certainly times when one tap is turned and the output is pure hot or cold, usually, though, it’s a mixture of the two to some degree because to most people, an unadulterated blast of extremely hot or extremely cold water is typically unpleasant. There aren’t hard-fast rules about what ‘warm’ temperature is, but most people would generally agree it’s between 90-110 degrees, hot being above 130, and cold 60-80, but that’s just one metric. To some folks, say Saami living in the Finnish arctic, their idea of ‘cold’ might have a much lower cut-off than that of a Mbuti in the Ituri rainforest, who live largely without refrigeration. But even beyond those extremes, someone with poor circulation might revel in hot water, and consider anything below 90 to be cool or cold. In this fashion, tastes vary, so instead of having exact cut-offs of “this is experimental” and “this is traditional”, the middle ground should generally be thought of as “containing experimental elements” or “with traditional leanings” or some variation that expresses the spectrum approach (there are, of course, some journals that especially embrace the experimental, which will noted in the list as such).

To that end, Cole Swensen has edited a tremendous anthology with David St. John published in 2009 called American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry which dubs itself as “A spirited anthology of contemporary American poetry that focuses on the new poem—the hybrid—a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles.” Swensen is a genius, so I’m going to use her words here, then add some annotations to dumb those words down for us regular folks a bit. This is from the introduction essay to American Hybrid

“This split is more than a stylistic one; it marks two concepts of meaning: one as transcendent, the other as immanent1. Thus, twentieth-century American poetry offers both a model of the poem as a vehicle for conveying thoughts, images, and ideas initiated elsewhere—a model that recognizes language as an accurate roadmap or system of referring to situations and things in the real world—and a model of the poem as an event on the page, in which language, while inevitably retaining a referential capacity, is emphasized as a site of meaning in its own right, and poetry is recognized as uniquely capable of displaying that2. Although many American poets throughout the twentieth century would not fit neatly into one mode or another3, the perspective of a hundred years reveals an overall pattern in which this split leads through various modifications, infiltrations, and permutations to the “anthology wars” of the late fifties and early sixties… it effectively brought all these marginal poetries together, naming them and throwing them into sharp focus, which marked the beginning of their demarginalization4… Though excellent poets were still writing with the formal tension that had typified much poetry of the 1950s, their numbers were fewer, and free verse was increasingly prevalent, based in a natural language modeled on Williams, but also importantly influenced by the Beat poets and all they had inherited from Whitman, including the Romantic impulse to see man’s corollary in nature5. 

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The footnotes

1: the poem has a universality/life beyond the page as in it talks about things that exist in the real world which can be researched, visited, attempted etc; or it is fully contained as the poem itself, something not to recognize in yourself but to look at and examine as an object of art more than a narrative, like a linguistic sculpture as opposed to a short film.

2: This is Swensen expanding on that first idea. The first type of poem being one that exists in the real world as we know it. It isn’t nonfiction, but if the poem says “A blue car” drove by, likely, that means an automobile as we know it, with paint the primary color blue, has rolled past the narrator. Whereas in the second type of poem, the words may not actually mean a car painted blue, it could be a metaphor for a sad person that has ‘transported’ their family across the country—that would be what Swensen means by “inevitably retaining a referential capacity”—it kinda means what it’s saying, although it may be more abstract than that. It may be more about invoking just the sounds of the words or creating a visual collage on the page with the words that represent things in a scene placed around the page like the frame of a photo instead of linearly—and whatever else you can imagine. Then another dozen or hundred things. That’s the beauty of true experimentation, I can’t guess what the experiment will be, no one can but the innovator themselves, and we don’t know the results until, well until we all see the results. Some experiments are more successful than others, and often that degree of success is subjective—much more than traditional literature. I certainly don’t claim to love all of EE Cummings’ experiments, but man did he lasso some unicorns. Oops, no spoilers. But if it still isn’t clear, think of it like I’d mentioned before, some poems are like short films, some are like abstract sculptures—you can imagine yourself within the first world, whereas you observe the second as a unique experience, the viewing of the poem or sculpture doesn’t tell a story or invoke real world places or objects even, it is a puzzle to decipher which may not have one single answer, but it can still be a very rewarding experience.

3: I wish this didn’t need to be said, but I find myself explaining this sentiment often myself when categorization comes up. Most poets that experiment, do so to varying degrees. Sometimes they may even write traditional verse—I know I do, and I enjoy it too! Ideally, I think most literary experimental dabblers will say that the form is integral to the content, so sometimes a simple message or narrative calls for a simple presentation. The spectrum applies to even an individual poet’s catalog. 

4: Part of the mystery of the mysterious is that it isn’t known—when we discover what a UFO actually is, it becomes just a flying object. Before we documented the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, that tiny square of black sky was a mystery. It could contain anything or absolutely nothing. When we got those images and started identifying the impossible number of previously unknown galactic structures that novel image had ‘shined a light on’ the unknown was brought “into sharp focus”. Does that mean that there aren’t other patches of emptiness to explore? Of course not! That’s what we’re doing today with our experiments! But we are doing these experiments in the context of all the knowledge we have now, which includes all that we learned from the HUDF. The mechanics and modes of those experiments, those UFOs are FOs. That doesn’t mean the FOs aren’t worth studying, just that the mystery of them went away a little bit, the more that the avant-garde was embraced by ‘the academy’ which is a much more formal and menacing than ‘colleges’, but that’s mostly what academia is. Professors, people that used to be professors, or that are qualified to be professors. People with a good amount of accumulated knowledge, at least (and often solely) in one field of study: literature.

5: I’d just add that the Beats also took a lot of influence from the Jazz Poets when it came to rhythm and improvisation. Kind of a nitpick, I just thought it deserved mentioning as I feel it’s a unique influence on the Beats in addition to Whitman. The final note is a reminder that many experiments aren’t necessarily so radical as to divorce words from their meanings, but may be unorthodox in their presentation, or in finding unexpected corollaries for the human experience in nature or the greater natural world. There is a solid strain of minimalism and eco-poetics among avant-garde writers, and I would venture that the natural world is especially prominent in many (though, of frickin’ course, not all) minimalist experiments. And of course after the Beat’s, well, concurrently and after, the langage school of poetry has been a tremendous influence on today’s avant-garde.

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Many will argue for the creation of literary experiments, but many as well will argue against their value, or question whether the experiments should have been undergone in the first place, let alone if they should be celebrated. I absolutely adore the remarkable shade Edna St. Vincent Millay cast at E.E. Cummings when she was making her recommendations to the Guggenheim Foundation for the prize in 1933. She emphatically was not amused by the personality of Cummings, though she’d never personally met the man, but she did recommend him despite being open that, in her words “If ever I disliked a man without ever having laid eyes on him, it is this same E.E. Cummings.” 

I think this quote from Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford[17], like the book itself, is worth reading a couple times. It shows a very intelligent person utterly frustrated by the intention of a certain collection of avant-garde poetry, while encouraging the furtherance of his experimentations—the ‘old guard’ allowing the ‘younguns’ to adventure, begrudgingly. This is a far cry from the censorship of The Chicago Review—though the shade is marvelous.

“I am not one of those who stand for the untouchable holiness of the capital letter and traditional typography. So far as I am concerned, Mr. Cummings may do anything he likes with the alphabet, the English grammar, and the multiplication table, provided only the result of his activities be something interesting, and, after a reasonable period of application, comprehensible, to a reader of culture and brains. Mr. Cummings may not, however, I say, write poetry in English which is more difficult for me to translate than poetry written in Latin. He may, of course, write it. But if he publishes it, if he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration, inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, and should not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group of persons… .But, unfortunately for one’s splendid hate which had assumed almost epic proportions, by no means all of Mr. Cummings poetry is of this nature. In these books which I have just been reading there is fine writing and powerful writing (as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn), and that this author has ability I could not deny; that he has more than that I gravely suspect. .Mr. Cummings in love, for instance, his arrogance for the moment subdued, his spirit troubled and humbled, can produce such beautiful poems as are to be found in parts IV or V of "Is 5." If we could only trust this author to proceed along these lines, and along the line of the thrillingly lovely "Paris; this April sunset" in Part III, nothing would be clearer than that Mr. Cummings must be given anything he asks for, if it can possibly be arranged… .What I propose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings enough rope. He may hang himself; or he may lasso a unicorn. In any case it is high time we found out about this man Cummings. Let us give him every opportunity to show us at once whether he is a genius, a charlatan, or a congenital defective,—and get him off our minds.”

What a wonderful world we’re living in when there are so many journals just tossing that rope out for us writers to rope up our herds of unicorns and cacti.

Wasn't that fun?

And finally, we’re onto the li—wait. A few notes about the submission process.

1. This is a stepping stone. Do not just read a journal’s description and submit to them. It is absolutely vital that you read at very least a few pieces in a journal or magazine or blog or whatever publication, before you submit to it. Some journals like pizzas, and some like french fries. If you pizza when you should have french fried you’re gonna have a bad time. Reading what the journal publishes, with the words they’ve chosen to describe themselves is the best way to maximize both your success and to minimize the irritation of the editors.
2. FOLLOW SUBMISSION GUIDELINES! I can’t say this enough, but it bears repeating.
3. Always follow the submission guidelines. when I read interviews with editors that is almost always the #1 thing they say, and often they say it twice. They wish people would follow their guidelines. Whatever they say they want, think of it like this. You’re a new concert venue, and that journal is a huge touring band. The submission guidelines are their rider (a band’s list of demands for backstage like snacks, alcohol, entertainment etc). They mean every single thing on there. Even if you think it’s unnecessary, like adding or removing your name from a submission, double spacing, saving as a pdf, a doc, whatever it is, do it. Pretend it’s a test. The band won’t come back if you don’t fulfill their rider, and can you blame them? There are literally thousands and thousands of other venues that will meet their rider’s requirements.
4. Always read the actual journal. Even if it’s just samples on their website if it’s a print magazine. I know, that’s rule one, and there’s only been 4 rules and this is the second one that’s repeated. That’s right, because there aren’t many rules. But the ones there are, are important if you want to be successful in your submissions. You want to send appropriate work, formatted appropriately. You should be able to read one of those pieces, then your piece, then back to the already published pieces without feeling like you’ve switched magazines. This is especially true when we’re talking about journals that specialize in experimental works because some have a very distinct type of experiment they like, whereas others are very wide-ranging in the scope of their tastes.
5. Read the guidelines and follow them. ESPECIALLY if the journal doesn’t allow simultaneous submissions, or reads submissions blind. That is often immediate grounds for rejection. Complain all you want about it being stupid, or not fair, they have their rules and they told you to follow the rules, and I told you. No excuse. Follow guidelines.

Cover Letter Anxiety?

A lot of journals require cover letters, they are almost entirely a formality, so if the journal wants one, give them one. Don’t stress about it, they don’t matter. Here is a link to some cover letter templates for creative writing submissions you can use from a March issue of my Journal Submission Journal, just add a little personal flair (don’t overdo it) and your submission’s proper info and you’re set.

If this essay was helpful, useful, entertaining or pitiful enough for you to think that I might deserve a dollar or two, I very much appreciate anything you might throw my way. Every penny will go to my own submission costs, and I will keep cranking out articles like this (though, perhaps not thiiiiiis lengthy usually), daily prompts and highlighting poems and journals that I think are awesome and that you, dear reader and writer of poetry. 

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The Big List:

Literary Journals Interested in Experimental Writing, Summer 2020 edition

A) Glimpse) of) From the Journal: A) GLIMPSE) OF) is an Athens based independent journal which publishes works by contemporary writers and artists in order to generate new narratives for the now. A) GLIMPSE) OF) is looking for #radicalpoetry  #experimentalwriting #SoundPoetry #VisualPoetry #ProsePoems  #ExperimentalProse  #HybridEssays #politicalart #collages #DigitalArt #SoundArt, photography , videos, non academic essays, queer, anti-capitalistic, idiosyncratic, naive, innovative, progressive, lyric, #feminist, grotesque, gurlesque, #multilingual, #collab works. No simultaneous submissions.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

A-Minor From Duotrope: Flash Fiction, Poetry, Mixed-Genre Works, Art/Text and Artwork. Tastes lean toward surreal, experimental, ambivalent, darkly lyrical and wildly imaginative. The magazine was a weekly publication from May 2010 to Feb 2013. Check out our archive on our website. Prose poetry, found poetry and hybrid form welcome.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

A Public Space From the Duotrope: A Public Space—an independent magazine of art and argument, fact and fiction—was founded in 2006 to give voice to the twenty-first century.

Submission Window/Type: 10/15-4/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

A Velvet Giant From the Journal: A Velvet Giant is soft & ferocious. Goofy & smart. Gorgeous & gross. A Velvet Giant likes to feel unsure. A Velvet Giant is an online literary journal. We love ambiguity: flash pieces, found pieces, cross-genre experiments, the "poem" that thinks it might be a story, the "story" that thinks it might be a poem. Retellings and reimaginings. Work that chips away at institutional structures. Work that breaks everything down so that it can build. A Velvet Giant is a collective space for work that exists outside the boundaries of genre. We recognize that it can feel impossible to talk about writing without categorizing it. When we say genreless, we don’t mean apolitical. Writing that resists binary categories such as fiction/nonfiction or poetry/prose is inherently queer and inherently political. We want writing that exists in the world, that resists tradition and expectations to build towards new ways of creating, feeling, and being.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres (a genreless literary journal)

After the Pause From the journal: We feature experimental poetry, flash fiction, visual poetry, and visual art from new, emerging, and veteran writers. In addition to our online magazine, we publish an annual print anthology featuring poetry and flash fiction from the previous four issues.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

AGON From the Journal: AGON seeks work unimpeded by form or by theme, whether serious-minded or playful, neo-classical or experimental, filthy or divine, and we are particularly interested in work in which two disparate themes, styles, etc. contend with one another - works which contend with themselves, whose elements are engaged in an agonal conflict. However, this is not necessary, since we will be perfectly content to include a selection of content which will stand at odds with others.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee).  Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Dreams

Always Crashing From the Journal: Always Crashing is now open for submissions of fiction, poetry, collage text, visual collage, video, labyrinths, manifestos, the generically transgressive, and nonfiction (though we prefer not to be told if it’s nonfiction). We are interested in surfaces and form. We are interested in discontinuity and want to watch you break things. We want to read works that seek something via untruth, fantasy, artificiality, the plastic, deep superficiality, and attention to their own construction. We are interested in work that strikes curious poses; in the “experimental,” not as an avant-garde, but as a furthering of a subterranean literary tradition. We are interested, ultimately, in the aesthetic: the beautiful and the sublime, sure, but also the boring, the dumb, the merely interesting, the zany, the disgusting, the cute—particularly when pushed into strange and unfamiliar territories.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Temporarily Closed), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

American Poetry Review From the Journal: The American Poetry Review is dedicated to reaching a worldwide audience with a diverse array of the best contemporary poetry and literary prose. APR also aims to expand the audience interested in poetry and literature, and to provide authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism

Anatolios From the Journal: Anatolios Magazine is a literary publication seeking high-quality writing and art. We publish three issues a year, two general and one themed (January), and accept all genres of writing and all forms of poetry. Experimentation, pushing boundaries, and bravery in writing are encouraged. We want writing that we can feel and that makes us think. We want your most vivid, raw, personal writing.

Submission Window/Type: December (themed), May, August, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

ANMLY From the Journal: We provide a platform for works of art that challenge conventions of form and format, of voice and genre…  Anomaly focuses on especially innovative and experimental literature and arts.

Submission Window/Type: 6/1-9/1, and 11/1-3/1, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

apt From the Journal: apt is a literary journal featuring challenging writing that combines the cerebral and the visceral. We publish an annual print issue focused on longform work, and our website is updated frequently with short fiction, poetry, and essays.

Submission Window/Type: 3/1-9/1 (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Arcturus From the Journal: We have no restrictions on the writers or content we publish, but we’re passionate about publishing new perspectives — new ideas, new voices, new worlds, new challenges, new ways of seeing, etc. — a theme that can take an infinite number of shapes, including speculative fiction, experimental poetry, political essays, narrative reportage, and virtually everything else.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Asterix) (Limited Demographic) From the Journal: Aster(ix) is a transnational feminist literary arts journal committed to social justice and translation, placing women of color at the center of the conversation. Aster(ix) is a play on asterisk, star, splat, a wildcard. It’s the censored and omitted. It’s footnotes and to be continued. (ix) honors Mayan heart-knowing, the alignment with divine will, the torch bearer. We cast lines between the future and the past, the possible and the impossible. What we are looking for in submissions are works that will take part in some of “the best conversations the world has to offer.”  Work that speaks beyond the trends of the current moment, that listens to the past and looks to the future. We are especially interested in work that is unconventional, international, urgent, lyrical, difficult, delicious and of differing aesthetics. In this time of lightning communications we want to read writing that is thoughtful and not necessarily certain

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Bad Pony From the Journal: We are a very bad pony. Maybe we have always been that way. Maybe we had a particularly bad childhood where instead of hay or grass, we were fed a large amount of Starburst. Or that we drooled while parents were taking pictures at the petting zoo. Maybe it is the fact that we often steal carrots from pockets or give children a little nip if they petted us too much. But we digress. We want stories and poems and art that speak to our bad selves, that sit sullen in a corner sucking a lollipop, trying to satisfy an oral fixation. We want pieces that smoke in the high school bathroom and play hooky, that whinny and wake the neighbors up, that jump the fences at night to root around in the neighbor's trashcans for some watermelon rinds.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Barrelhouse From Duotrope: Barrelhouse is an independent non-profit literary organization. Barrelhouse bridges the gap between serious art and pop culture. Barrelhouse is a journal featuring fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays about music, art, and the detritus of popular culture. Barrelhouse is produced by writers for readers who are looking for quality writing with an edge and a sense of humor. Stories originally published in Barrelhouse have been featured in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Million Writer’s Award.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently only open for book reviews), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Bat City Review From the Journal: Founded in 2004, Bat City Review is a literary journal run by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, supported by the English Department and the James A. Michener Center for Writers. We are interested in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, art, and cross-genre pieces that experiment with language, form, and unconventional subject matter.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Current deadline 7/1-11/1/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Bear Review From the Journal: We’re big readers, so we admire pieces that make the old new. We also dig aesthetic competence and a knowledge of genre and literary tradition. That said, we admire experimentation and blurred genres as well, so long as the writer brings the heat.

Submission Window/Type: 1/1-6/30 & 7/1-12/31, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Beloit Fiction Journal From the Journal: The Beloit Fiction Journal publishes the best in contemporary short fiction. Traditional and experimental narratives find a home in our pages. We publish new writers alongside established writers. As one of the few fiction-only journals in the country, we’re able to feature as many as fifteen new stories per issue. We publish fiction in a variety of lengths, and occasionally accept excerpts.

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-12/1. Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction 

Beloit Poetry Journal From the Journal: Our longstanding mission is to seek out and share work of fresh and lasting power, poems that speak startling, complicated, necessary truths and that do so in surprising and beautiful ways. Since 1950, the BPJ has cleaved to a set of editorial practices that enable discovery of vibrant new voices and that foster long-lasting relationships with some of the most gifted, important poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our aim is to offer work that pushes boundaries of content, aesthetic, and form—to showcase what’s becoming of contemporary poetry… As a result, we’re known for publishing long poems other journals won’t make space for. We’re known for publishing formally challenging poems, for printing the brutally honest and the unparaphrasable alongside the wryly funny, and lyrics that ring clear as bells.

Submission Window/Type: 1/1-2/28 & 6/1-8/31. Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry 

Bending Genres From the Journal: We seek thrilling, fanciful, oddball, unusual, stunning fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction pieces. Think Olympics on a case of Red Bull. Think October in April. Think Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. A world not quite right? Yes, that is Bending Genres. We seek POETRY that is unusual, experimental, terrifying, delightful, stunning, rare, deep, whooshes out, magnanimous and secretive. We enjoy blending genres, hybrid writing, blurred lines and creative bursts of stylistic fusion. We seek FICTION that is experimental, gut-wrenching, terrifying, gorgeous, breakneck speed, delightful, memorable and secretive. We like blending genres, hybrid writing, blurred lines. No Simultaneous Submissions.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Bennington Review From the Journal: We aim to stake out a distinctive space for innovative, intelligent, and moving fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film writing, and cross-genre work. In the spirit of poet Dean Young’s dictum that poets should be “making birds, not birdcages,” we are particularly taken with writing that is simultaneously graceful and reckless.

Submission Window/Type: 11/1-5/8, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres
Berkeley Poetry Review From the Journal: Berkeley Poetry Review seeks language-based and/or experimental writing, translations, art, and (with less frequency) essays and interviews. We are particularly interested in work that complicates prevailing conceptions of race, gender, sexuality, and poetic form itself.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Current deadline 9/30 for "Static/Stasis" theme for "Midterm 4"), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Big Other From the Journal: We welcome submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, lyric essay, art, video, short drama, and hybrid work from both established and emerging writers and artists. We are especially interested in experimental and innovative art, literary and otherwise.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Bindweed Magazine For context: Very relevant 6-questions interview with the editor.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Birdfeast From the Journal: While we have some aesthetic leanings, we're open to anything that you think we'd like. The best way to get an idea of what we publish is to read the most recent issue. That said, we like surprises. For upcoming issues, we're especially interested in seeing more visual poetry, translations, hybrid and experimental work, lyric essays, and work that doesn't fit neatly into boxes.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (100 a month then they close until the next month), Submit only twice a year. Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres (up to 8 pages)

Bitter Oleander From the Journal: As always, your work should be as imaginative as possible, not bound by any conventional attitudes outside yourself, while inspiring yourself as you write.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Short Fiction 

Blackbird From the Journal: What’s in a name? Our title arises from a triple mindfulness. First, it is a respectful nod toward a famed former resident of our city who penned a poem haunted by a talking bird repeating a single ominous word; second, it recognizes that tradition and innovation always share a dynamic space, that “when the river is moving the blackbird must be flying”; and finally, it recalls a well-known song in which a blackbird must take its broken wings and learn to fly. The Blackbird aesthetic aims to be large-minded and adventurous. Poe, Stevens, the Beatles—these iconic figures represent a broadly encompassing, evolving awareness that we embody in our journal.

Submission Window/Type: (Last window was) 8/1 to 4/1. Individual Submission Server (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres.

Black Sun Lit: Digital Vestiges From the Journal: Our ambition is to publish works that harken to the complex and transgressive traditions of decadentism, symbolism, modernism, surrealism, or the nouveau roman—among other innovative literary movements—and compile them so that single voices are not floating alone but gathered into a corpus in which a reader can find a commonality of intents.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (100 a month then they close until the next month), Submit only twice a year. Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres. 

Black Warrior Review From the Journal’s website: In 2019, BWR was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and was that year’s Print Development Grantee. The judges’ citation read, “Full of elegance and grit, fluidity and resolve, Black Warrior Review is a singular beacon for adventurous writing that shines forth from Alabama. This journal brings together what is gorgeous and necessary in literature today, treating each piece it publishes as an act of optimistic revolution. Black Warrior Review dissolves convention and leaves possibility in its place.”

Submission Window/Type: 12/1-3/1 & 6/1-9/1. Submittable ($3). Guidelines

Genres: All genres 

Blood Orange Review From the Journal: Blood Orange Review publishes writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our editors want writing that changes us and challenges us to redefine our sense of perspective. We look for compelling voices and work that demonstrates attention to the page. We are thrilled when we publish someone for the first time, and though our journal is modestly-sized and our selection is competitive, we encourage both emerging and established writers to submit

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-4/1. Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry 

Blood Tree Literature From the Journal: Blood Tree Literature favors lyrical pieces that do not withhold depth or resonance. With that in mind, submit to us your best, the box under your bed marked UNSHARABLE, the orphan poem or black sheep fiction. Send us your experimentals; be vulnerable, be calculated.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Hybrid, Fiction

BOAAT Journal Here is a profile of BOAAT from Poets & Writers. From an interview in the minnesota review with the journal’s editor: “it’s hard to pin down a certain aesthetic because each issue is tonally different from the next. To give you some behind-the-scenes context our selection process goes through three stages. The Readers pass their favorite poems onto our Associate Editors, and our Associate Editors pass their favorite poems onto Sam Sax, our Poetry Editor. We rarely solicit and try to be inclusive in diversity as much as possible.”

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently open). Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry 

Bodega Magazine From the Journal: Bodega releases digital issues on the first Monday of every month, featuring poetry, prose, and occasional interviews by established and emerging writers. We’re here to give you a handful of essential pieces you can digest in one sitting.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee & Tip-Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction
Boiler, The From the Journal: THE BOILER began in 2011 by a group of writers at Sarah Lawrence College. We are an online quarterly that publishes fresh and lively works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from emerging and established authors. We like work that turns up the heat, whistles, and stands up to pressure. The Boiler is looking for great poetry. Poetry from those hungry writers with something to say. Poems that refuse to sit still on the tongue and in the mind. Poems that believe in risk and precision. We seek fiction submissions that display commonalities in the human spirit which derive from an American ideal. Whether those commonalities display loss, defeat, triumph, humor, abandonment, fortitude, etc. We want to showcase honesty within that human spirit. We admire duality of character, conflict and unique personality. We feel what makes us unique is our dedication to publishing works that aren't afraid to cross boundaries. It's very difficult to shock readers these days. When we read a story, it should evoke the sensation that something has taken hold of us, that we can't stop reading it. We ask that stories not be written for shock alone, but with the knowledge that from strangeness, humanity shines.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Next deadline 8/16), Submittable (No Fee & Tip-Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Bomb Magazine From the Magazine: Founded in 1981, BOMB Magazine is dedicated to delivering the artist's voice. BOMB includes a print quarterly magazine and an online daily publication. We encourage submissions of adventurous work that push the boundaries of form or content in some way. Our submission period is open once a year in the fall.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-11/1 (subject to change), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Bombay Gin From the Journal: Bombay Gin publishes innovative poetry, prose, and hybrid texts as well as art, translations, and interviews. Emerging from the “Outrider” or left-hand lineage, which operates outside the cultural mainstream, Bombay Gin honors a heritage of powerful scholarship and counter-poetics through the publication of work that challenges the boundaries of language, form, and genre.

Submission Window/Type: Reading period varies, currently closed with no announced dates (No Fee). Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Burnt Pine Magazine From the Journal: Burnt Pine Magazine publishes literature that burns like wildfire. By that we mean we publish work that will change our readers. Perhaps it will make them uncomfortable, inspired, or sorrowful. Regardless, they will not be the same by the final word. Like a forest fire that is harsh yet rejuvenating, we expect the work we publish to burn away the tangles of the reader’s imagination and preconceived notions. The literature read in Burnt Pine will help readers see the world in a new, unrestricted perspective.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Next reading window opens 7/24/20), Submittable (No Fee & Tip-Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

BOOTH From the Journal: Booth embraces great storytelling, distinctive voices, both classic and inventive forms, gravity + comedy, grim reapers and grand weepers, and anything carried by a rich sense of story and heart.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Breakwater Review From the Journal: BREAKWATER REVIEW was founded in 2009 and is run by students of the University of Massachusetts Boston MFA program. We currently publish digitally three times a year. A breakwater is a barrier of rocks or concrete, built out into a body of water to protect a coast or harbor from extreme weather and hazardous conditions. In a world that oftentimes feels shattered and broken, we seek to publish both established and (more importantly) new voices from diverse backgrounds. Words that unite us against the storm—challenging our own perceptions of reality in fresh and interesting ways.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-4/31 (No Fee), Year-Round ($3), Submittable (No Fee & Tip-Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Cafe Irreal From the Journal: This fiction, which we would describe as irreal, resembles the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. As a type of fiction it rejects the tendency to portray people and places realistically and the need for a full resolution to the story; instead, it shows us a reality constantly being undermined. Therefore, we're interested in stories by writers who write about what they don't know, take us places we couldn't possibly go, and don't try to make us care about the characters.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Deadlines roughly one month before issue publication), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction 

Cagibi From the Journal: Cagibi is invested in sharing the universal human experiences to be found in works of prose and poetry set within places unfamiliar to readers; thus, our expressed interest in international—or world—literature, and works in translation. CAGIBI is versatile in its purpose and mission to readers and writers. The journal concerns literature in which character conflict, ultimately story, is tied to place. The retreats provide unique and stimulating place experience. In one interpretation, le cagibi is the place at which a writer’s inspiration is rendered into story, or shaped into poem.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (all year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

CALAMITY From the Journal: CALAMITY is a poetry & art journal. Send us something new, something urgent. Send us something that will wreck us. Send us your best disasters. Send us ghosts. Weird us out & confuse us. Make us uncomfortable & ashamed. Send us a middle finger (a symbolic one, please not an actual severed one). Make us laugh or sob or both simultaneously. Baptize us in the gauntlet of your art then release us out the other side gleaming & disoriented.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Art

Capilano Review, The From the Journal: For over forty years, The Capilano Review (TCR) has supported and been sustained by a vibrant community of readers, writers, and artists interested in experimentation in writing and art.

Submission Window/Type: Varies, Submittable (Varies). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

carte-blanche From the Journal: At carte blanche we believe there is more than one way to tell a story. Our mandate is to provide a venue for narrative of all forms from fiction and nonfiction, to poetry and photo essays. 

Submission Window/Type: Varies (“Anxiety” theme 5/18-7/15/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Cease, Cows From the Journal: At Cease, Cows we want to explore the contemporary, the strange, the big questions. We want to feel cultural pulses, expose mental arteries, bathe in both the sanguine and sanguinary. We want to publish prose with fire and truth. Humans may be animals, but the power of words can allow us to revel in or transcend the physical. The best literature achieves both. Or something profound like that. We want your flash fiction to udderly wow us. We’re bored on this godforsaken farm. Help us pass the time without so much corn whiskey. Send as many stories that equal up to 1500 words as you like, just don’t go over our limits! We want your very best free and formal verse. We want poetry that makes us pause mid-chew, we want to be moo-ved. We’re also partial to grazing on prose poems and the experimental. 150 lines max per submission. Better not send us rhyming poems or we’ll give you the hoof.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Temporarily Closed, no word on until when), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Chicago Review From Wikipedia: Chicago Review is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and special features in double issues. Three stories published in Chicago Review have won the O. Henry Award. Work that first appeared in Chicago Review has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2002, The Best American Poetry 2004, and The Best American Short Stories 2003.

Submission Window/Type: All Year (for nonfiction) 10/1-6/15 (for Poetry & Fiction), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Chicago Quarterly Review From the Journal: The writer’s voice ought to be clear and unique and should explain something of what it means to be human. We want well-written stories that reflect an appreciation for the rhythm and music of language, work that shows passion and commitment to the art of writing.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Citron Review From the Journal: In each issue of the journal, you can experience the larger world through very small, focused lenses—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in small, economical packages. The essays and poems and stories in The Citron Review land all along the spectrum of human experience. They do what literature does best—tell us what it’s like to be human in new and different ways. We hope to include all of the possibilities that entails within this journal. Generally, we’re looking for pretty much anything that fits within our guidelines. It can be traditional or experimental.

Submission Window/Type: 2/1-11/30 for Poetry(<30 lines), Flash Fiction (<1000 words), Micro Fiction/Prose Poetry (<100 words);  Nonfiction read all year, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Clade Song From the Journal: At Clade Song we are interested in the evolution of poetry from the phoneme outwards, from raw, exclamatory yelping to the insect hymns sung to enshrine the concrete and the nonce. The drive to the herd found in individual expression. Fusion of eye and ear and mind. We believe writing of necessity must evolve at all points—from syntax to the kinds of interactive changes that take place between an animal (writer) and its environment. We promote a deep ecology which accepts poetry’s resistance to the paradigm of use value.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Clockhouse From the Journal: Dare. Risk. Dream. Share. Ruminate. How do we understand our place in the world, our responsibility to it, and our responsibility to each other? Clockhouse is an eclectic conversation about the work-in-progress of life—a soul arousal, a testing ground, a new community, a call for change. Join in.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (last window was 8/15-12/15), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Cloud Rodeo From the Journal: CLOUD RODEO IS AVANT-GENRE / CLOUD RODEO IS POST-GENRE \ CLOUD RODEO IS AN IRREGULARLY PUBLISHED JOURNAL OF THE IRREGULAR

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All Year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres (They consider themselves “post-genre”)
Coastal Shelf From the Journal: We like surprise here at Coastal Shelf. Not Shyamalanian twists or deus-ex-machinas, but surprises at every level of language. We like to laugh but don’t like groaners—usually. We are ok with scratching our heads a bit at the end of a piece as long as the ride is good. That said, a good “greater observation couched in a short narrative” piece can be a recipe for success, but mostly—surprise us! Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently only open for “Pay-it-Forward” submissions which go entirely to writer’s compensation), Submittable (No Fee, Tip-Jar & Pay-it-Forward). Guidelines.

Cold Mountain Review From the Duotrope: Cold Mountain Review is a forum for well-told stories. We publish narrative poetry and lyrical prose, and we are interested in the way contemporary literature is testing the boundaries of genre. Each issue of CMR features work intended to transport the reader to unexpected landscapes—emotional terrains that are sometimes joyful, occasionally disconcerting, always interesting. Since its founding 35 years ago, CMR has featured writers such as Robert Morgan, R.T. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Virgil Suarez, and Fred Chappell. CMR contributors have among them an Academy Award in Literature, and a number of other accolades that attest to the quality of conversation that has long been taking place in the pages of CMR. Writers have different approaches to storytelling, and they write for varied reasons; but when they publish their work in CMR, they are telling their story directly to you, the reader. Lean in. Listen.

Submission Window/Type: 8/15-9/1 & 1/15-2/1 (Short reading windows),  Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Collidescope, The From the Journal: The Collidescope aims to publish writing that is subversive in nature, that is art for art’s sake. There is a difference between a writer simply telling a story (or telling a story simply) and creating a work of art. We love to see the mental fireworks of a writer wrestling with their imagination, with language itself. First and foremost, fiction/poetry/personal essays should be true to the author’s intentions and censor nothing in response to the vague concept of an audience. From there, ensorcell us with your language, with your brain-bubbling phrases, make us question whether we are awake or dreaming. Stimulate both our intellect and our emotions. Sparse language can be just as evocative as bedizened language, it all depends on that arcane combination of words. We gravitate mostly toward magical realism and the surreal/slipstream. This is not the place for slice of life fiction, unless your language is experimental.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Columbia Journal From the Journal: Columbia Journal seeks submissions of poetry, nonfiction, fiction, art, and translation, for both print and online. We’re in search of innovative, outward-looking voices, stories that break boundaries and language that lingers. We're dedicated to publishing the work of the freshest voices in literature and art alongside established artists, poets and writers. Every year, a new staff takes over Columbia Journal, made up entirely of second-year students in the MFA creative writing program: poets, nonfiction and fiction writers who are looking to publish the visionary, experimental work that Columbia Journal is known for.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Currently has a 7/31 online deadline), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Conduit From the Journal: Conduit is a biannual literary journal that is at once direct, playful, inventive, irreverent, and darkly beautiful. Despite common sense and the laws of economics, Conduit has been thwarting good taste, progress, and consensus for over twenty years. Conduit publishes distinctive voices of literary merit—experimental to accessible, established to emerging—in snazzy volumes, featuring work that demonstrates originality, intelligence, courage, and humanity. Conduit champions a fresh mix of writers.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Conium Review From the Journal: We publish innovative writing. Send us stories that take risks. Experiment with character, structure, or theme. Get weird with it. The Conium Review publishes innovative writing. We don't rely on quotas or preconceived notions of what's "publishable."  We want your wildest settings and weirdest plots. We want fine-tuned prose and active characters. But most importantly, we want your very best writing, whatever that entails.

Submission Window/Type: Varies, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Conjunctions From the Journal: Bard College’s literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For over three decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous quality.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2) From the Journal: Contemporary Verse 2 is a quarterly literary journal that publishes poetry and critical writing about poetry, including interviews, articles, essays, and reviews. It is our policy to publish new writing by both emerging and established poets. The writing we encourage reflects a diversity representing a range of social and cultural experience along with literary excellence.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-5/31, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Contrary From the Journal: Poetry—We believe poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. We look especially for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation of beauty and concern. Contrary’s poetry in particular often mimics the effects of fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally contrary toward form – they tug on the forces of exposition or narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of all the poetic forms we publish. Fiction—We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end? We have published long stories on the belief that they succeed, but we feel more comfortable with the concise. We favor fiction that is contrary in any number of ways, but our fiction typically defies traditional story form. A story may bring us to closure, for example, without ever delivering an ending. It may be as poetic as any poem.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (DOES NOT SEND REJECTIONS: “If your submission is accepted, you will hear from us. If not, you can always verify that it was not accepted by viewing the issue for which you submitted. We do not send rejection letters.”), Form on Website (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Cotton Xenomorph From the Journal: Cotton Xenomorph is a new literary journal produced with the mission to showcase new, and ecstatic art while reducing language of oppression in our community. We are dedicated to uplifting new and established voices while engaging in thoughtful conversation around social justice.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-5/31, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

Cream City Review From the Journal: Cream City Review is Milwaukee’s leading literary journal devoted to publishing memorable and energetic pieces that push the boundaries of writing.  Continually seeking to explore the relationship between form and content… We devote ourselves to publishing memorable and energetic fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork which represent a broad range of creators with diverse, unique backgrounds. Both beginning and well-known writers are welcome!

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-11/1 & 1/1-4/1, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Denver Quarterly From the Journal: Denver Quarterly is the literary journal housed at the University of Denver, currently in its 54th year of consecutive print publication. 

Submission Window/Type: 10/15-2/15 (for Print Journal), Rolling (for FIVES, their new online companion journal), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

DIAGRAM From the Journal: WE VALUE the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance, work that moves us, language that does something new, or does something old--well. We like iteration and reiteration. Ruins and ghosts. Mechanical, moving parts, balloons, and frenzy. Buzz us. WE WANT art and writing that demonstrates / interaction; the processes / of things, both inner and outer; how certain functions are accomplished; how things become. How they expire. How they move or churn, or stand. We'll consider anything you see fit to send us. PLEASE DO NOT SUBMIT anything titled "13 ways of looking at X" when X is anything at all, because it's like, totally, a variable. You remember the good old days of algebra. Such a great word, algebra. Got a hint of sex and mystery to it. Also adolescent confusion. Anger. Great Balls of Ire. Wait, what were we talking about? Oh. Or know at least that if you submit it we will possibly Be Irritated. And it better be Totally Awesome because it takes a lot of Awesome to trump Irritation. (When that happens—rarely, rarely—it is a great feeling, though.) This proscription is because we get work submitted relatively often that is rocking the blackbird thing, yes, we've read it too, and it can almost never achieve liftoff. Or maybe we just haven't seen any real rockets yet. In which case, go ahead, rocket us. But wait, maybe on second thought, we don't want to get a ton of "13 ways" submissions. Unless they are all Mind Blowing. And make Questionable Use of Initial Capitals. Caveat submittor. Is that Latin? we hope so. Maybe we should Wikipedia it or something.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Individual Individual CLMP Server (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

diode From the Journal: We welcome all types of poetry (including, but not limited to, narrative experimental, visual, found and erasure poetry). We also accept poetry in translation, and collaborative poems.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Dodging the Rain From the Journal: I want poetry that feels – each poem to have its own personality and voice. Writing that experiments and challenges our preconceptions of poetry, that looks forward. Don’t pay tribute to poets past; hit me with concision, directness, ‘new.’ I lean towards first-person poems with intense or unreliable narrators, third-person poems that are remarkably precise, and poetic experiments that may surprise and engage our readers.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Dream Pop From the Journal: We welcome submissions from marginalized voices, and we are especially interested in publishing work from emerging writers working in experimental, non-narrative forms. Please send us your very best strange utterings, hybrid works, collaborative pieces, visual poetry, collages, and linguistic inventions. We hope that you will challenge the limits of what literature can be and that you will share your results with us.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year),  Individual Server (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

DREGINALD From the Journal: DREGINALD is an online literary magazine seeking to publish excellent writing. DREGINALD is not particular when it comes to form/genre because DREGINALD cares only about excellence. You send your most excellent work and DREGINALD says either “no thanks” or “give me that.” DREGINALD is not scared. Try us. We’re ready.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee).  Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

DUM DUM Zine From the Journal: DUM DUM Zine publishes experimental lit and art that embraces all creative forms. When we’re not publishing our annual zine, we’re constantly searching for new multi-platform literature and art to share online. In the past we’ve featured hybrid fiction and poetry, text message interviews, experimental music and art reviews, prank email chains, crowd-sourced community photo projects, and even serialized radio plays.

elsewhere From the Journal: elsewhere cares only about the line / no line. We want short prose works (flash fiction, prose poetry, nonfiction) that cross, blur, and/or mutilate genre. We publish six writers and one photo quarterly. Give us your homeless, your animals, your lunch money: we're hungry.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Prose Poetry, Fiction

EOAGH From the Journal: EOAGH is dedicated to the idea of reading as a process, the productive chaos of investigative poetic work. We seek to foreground the writing of experimental women, trans, feminist, transfeminist, POC, anti-racist, and LGBT/queer authors. We seek work that explores the acts of attention not just in writing but also in being written. Inspired by the assertion that “reading is a gymnast’s act,” we see readings as embodied, interdisciplinary responses that engage with one’s environment through documentary poetics, identity and the disruption of identity, ekphrasis, phenomenology, procedural multiplicity, density, and difficulty. We seek essays, articles, reviews, and readings that address these concerns in contemporary experimental and innovative writing.

Submission Window/Type: Varies, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Epigraph Magazine From Duotrope: Epigraph Magazine is an internet-based poetry journal. We love experimental poetry. We love poems that make us question what poems are. We love the internet. We love immediacy. We love distance. Send us your words.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year—though temporarily closed), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres
E·ratio From the Journal: Poetic discourse idioms. E·ratio publishes poetry in the postmodern idioms with an emphasis on the intransitive. By “idioms” (plural) is meant a tolerance for variations. By “postmodern” the absence of a hyphen. No simultaneous submissions. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres

Evergreen Review From the Journal:  In 1957, Barney Rosset, Fred Jordan and a few others launched The Evergreen Review with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy. For the next sixteen years, Evergreen published writing that launched an assault on American propriety: literary, sexual, and social. Evergreen’s genius lay in its ability to mix radical American voices from the literary and social fringes—Burroughs, Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, LeRoi Jones, Henry Miller—with a global cast of writers, many of whom were introduced to American readers by the magazine: Beckett, Genet, Grass, Ōe, Duras, Paz, Walcott, Nabokov. The magazine was often shocking, always intriguing. It featured some of the finest writing available, by writers whose influence continues to shape contemporary literature… [Its] legacy of searching out the stories that aren’t being told or aren’t being heard: stories that challenge our sensibilities and expand our understanding of the way people actually live in the world, and the way their truths can be expressed.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry
Expanded Field From the Journal: Expanded Field is a biannual English-language journal for creative writing and image/text experimentation. Established in 2017, it publishes original and translated fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics, and other experimental works not easily classified within genre boundaries. Under the direction of the student-led editorial board, located at the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, it offers an online and open-access platform for the exhibition of works from new to established and national to international writers and artists. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

EX/POST From the Journal: We want the raw, unblinking work that will haunt us unapologetically. We want to be a home for timely, experimental, and most of all daring writing. Send us your secret radio transmissions or your experiments gone awry—we will welcome all of it.

Submission Window/Type: On temporary hiatus to publish Issue 1, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Felt, The From the Journal: An online journal of poetry and prose produced by Pratt Institute’s MFA in Writing, The Felt is interested in the creation and cultivation of emancipatory poetic spaces for felt sentiments that have been marginalized, displaced, or estranged from the dominant culture. Like the textile of its namesake, The Felt is an intricate entanglement unlimited in every direction. We strive to publish disobedient and daring work that invites departure, resistance, engagement, and the collaborative, tender-hearted making of new knowledge. Complex experiences invite complex readings. Lived experience shapes and influences what we create and how we create it. We feel it is no longer viable to hold the artist separate from the work, and that the work is not bodiless. It is in the writing that the connection between body and language unfolds endlessly, and with variation. The Felt aims to undermine overwhelming whiteness and interrupt privilege through the creation and conservation of poetic spaces*—including and not limited to feminist, queer, POC, migratory, non-classist, non-ableist—in which revolutionary subjects can cultivate alternative realities.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Fence From the Journal: In continuous publication since 1998, Fence is a biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that redefines the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques.

Submission Window/Type: 7/1-31 (though, Submittable says they read until 8/15), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Fiction (Yes, that Fiction) From the Journal: Since its inception, Fiction has aimed to bring the experimental to a broader audience, and to bring new voices to the forefront, publishing emerging authors alongside well known and established writers.

Submission Window/Type: 10/15-4/15, Individual Server (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction 

Fiction International From the Journal: Fiction International is the only literary journal in the United States emphasizing formal innovation and social activism. Founded by Joe David Bellamy in 1973 at St. Lawrence University in New York, the journal was relocated to San Diego State University in 1982 and is edited by Harold Jaffe. Each issue revolves around a theme and features a wide variety of fiction, nonfiction, indeterminate prose, and visuals by leading writers and artists from around the world.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (next is “Compassion” theme reading 9/14-2/1), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction

Figure 1 From the Journal: Figure 1 is a digital poetry journal founded in 2017. We’re committed to writing that reconfigures how we see the world. We aim to publish new and underrepresented voices that push against any slack thinking in the current literary scene. Send us poems, send us sharp-edged word-objects you can’t quite call poems.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

filling Station Magazine From the Journal: filling Station Magazine promotes innovative and original Canadian poetry, fiction, and literary journalism, and to encourage dialogue among local, national and international writers through their work, assisting the advancement of Canadian literature and bringing this work to the reading public. filling Station exists to publish innovative work

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Five:2:One From the Journal: FIVE:2:ONE believes that weird is dangerously close to being the coolest thing in the world! But, you may ask yourself what is weird? How did I get here? Well, the quirky is weird. Visual, concrete, conceptual, language, flarf, found poems, hybrid / cross genre audio poetry is weird and we adore that. Experimental and non narrative fiction is weirdly fantastic and we adore the hell out of that too, collage, surreal and experimental visual arts are weird too (so you get the idea) we like that as well. We also love pop culture references in anything because that’s weird and we like that too. Alright, so we like weird but also want work that explode with emotions. We want essays and manifestos full of life. We aren’t all serious here at F2O; not at all we want to laugh too. Send us your humor pieces, comics and political art . Send us philosophical works, scientific, political works. We want mad science in our stories, poems, art and essays. Show us something that nobody else has done. Basically, send us your most on point and dank af babies. To be honest our mission statement is to have no mission statement and we are lax about it, but we have our preferences too. So, with that being said we’d prefer more e.e. cummings, Lyn Lifishin, Aimee Bender and Haruki Murakami and less Billy Collins, Nicholas Sparks and John Gresham

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee & Tip Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Fleas on the Dog From the Journal: We are a collective of writers/editors who publish a non profit online magazine for those who are on the avant garde and outside the box. We take pretty much everything. Mainstream, traditional, literary, barbaric yawps, flash, metafiction, experimental, sci/fi, speculative, fantasy, mystery, micro, nano, grunge, bad (but it better be good!), modernist, post-modernist, spamlit, kitschlit, retro, metro, outsider, novel excerpts, graphic stories, even comics.   Our only criterion is quality.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (August 30, 2020 deadline), Email (No Fee). Guidelines (bottom of page).

Genres: All genres

Flock From the Journal: Flock literary journal opens space for boundary-pushing literature by publishing emotionally resonant work that is strange yet familiar, surprising but grounded, and softly experimental in form, language, or content. Flock has long been home to a broad range of styles, with a core interest in risky and bold work that might not find a home at more traditional journals.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Florida Review (Editor’s note: I’ve noticed their online component Aquifer publishes more experimental work than their print journal) From the Journal: We are looking for innovative, luxuriant, insightful human stories—and for things that might surprise us. We like writing that takes risks, affects us deeply, and yet also meets the highest standards of beautiful language and  syntax that supports the meaning of the work.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($2 for Aquifer-online, $3 for Florida Review-print). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Foglifter (Limited Demographic) From the Journal: Foglifter welcomes daring and thoughtful queer work, in all forms, and we are especially interested in cross-genre, intersectional, marginal, and transgressive work. We want the pieces that challenged you as a writer, what you poured yourself into and risked the most to make. But we also want your tenderest, gentlest work, what you hold closest to your heart. Whatever you’re working on now that’s keeping you alive and writing, Foglifter wants to read it.

Submission Window/Type: 3/1-5/1 & 9/1-11/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Foundry From the Journal: Foundry publishes a range of styles and forms, from short lyric poems to prose poems and longer narratives. We are drawn to poems that feel as much as they think. Poems are manufactured objects — the intangible cast into forms. Foundry showcases poems crafted by writers at all stages of their practice. We are interested in poems as made things, and we are interested in their making.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Fourteen Hills From the Journal: Since its inception in 1994, Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review has contributed to a vibrant literary tradition on the West Coast centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its commitment to presenting a diversity of experimental and progressive work by emerging and cross-genre writers, as well as by award-winning and established authors, has earned it a reputation for literary excellence. Being independent means its aesthetic is dynamic and fluid, ever changing to meet the needs of the culture and the historical moment as the staff perceive them. As an international literary magazine, Fourteen Hills has developed a reading audience that goes beyond the San Francisco Bay Area to the international community.

Submission Window/Type: 2/15-6/15, Submittable ($2). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

F(r)iction From the Journal: Experimental, nontraditional, and boundary-pushing literature is strongly encouraged. Show us your wildest and weirdest! All genres are welcome, but especially those that celebrate the weird, take risks with form and content, and are driven by a strong, unique voice.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($2.50). Guidelines.

Genres:All genres

FRiGG Magazine From the Journal: FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry is published online twice a year, in the spring/summer and fall/winter. (from the Duotrope interview) The ideal submission is honest, true, a pack of lies, idiosyncratic, smart, funny, sad, ugly, and beautiful. Be very honest in what you write... Maybe use words that you particularly like. Maybe do a funny bit. It's OK to swear. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All Genres

Fugue From Duotrope: Begun in 1990 by the faculty in the Department of English at University of Idaho, Fugue has continuously published poetry, plays, fiction, essays, and interviews from established and emerging writers. We take pride in the work we print, writers we publish, and the presentation of each and every issue. Working in collaboration with local and national artists, our covers display some of the finest art from photography and digital art to ink drawings and oil paintings. We believe that each issue is a print and digital artifact of the deepest engagement with our culture, and we make it our personal goal that the writing we select and presentation of each issue reflect the reverence we have for art and letters.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Ghost Proposal From the Journal: At Ghost Proposal, we’re into writing that is aware of its own topography. We like work that engages with thought process. We publish: essays / poetry / lyric essays / prose poems / hybrid genre / cross-genre work that nestles in between essays and poetry

work that stretches the boundaries of essays and poetry we do publish translations that fit our aesthetic we do not publish narrative fiction + nonfiction. We do not label the genre of the work we publish. We want to engage with the work itself outside the boundaries of a label. We want to talk about what the work is doing, not what it is.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Current reading period is 7/1-10/1/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

Check out their Spy in the Slushpile interview!

Ghost Town From the Journal: GHOST TOWN is an international literary magazine curated by California State University San Bernardino. We’re looking for fearless and inventive fiction, flash fiction, poetry, essays and translations.  After Issue 10 is live, we will be closing submissions for a time to rest and regroup.

Submission Window/Type: On Hiatus (for who knows how long, but hopefully not indefinitely), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Gigantic Sequins From the Journal: Gigantic Sequins is a not-for-profit literary-arts magazine. Our black & white journal is known for its quality of writing as well as its unique design and aesthetic. We accept work from writers who have never been published as well as those who have established their voice already in the literary community. We enjoy printing writers who have their hands in various sorts of figurative, creative cookie jars. We are interested in cultivating an artistic community over a widespread area. We believe that community, however, should never be focused in one place, especially in these technologically impressive days.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Gone Lawn From the Journal: Desired: sincere, well-written, imaginative, unusual and/or innovative works that charm and displace us, that baffle the pale-setters of our rolling, verdant isles and nab all their dreary tools. Gone Lawn is especially partial to odd animals.

Our broad arm-spans welcome fiction, prose and prose poetry, as well as visual narratives and work involving sound and motion. We wish we received more material described in the latter clause than we do.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction/Prose, Prose Poetry
GRAVITON From the Journal: At GRAVITON we want to observe & examine the phenomenons of the world & exhibit what pulls, pushes, exerts us to create; to come together with poetry & art. So convince us. Make us feel your force, your power, your art that makes us stop & feel the weight pull us towards a better understanding. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Poetry
Grist From the Journal: Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts seeks high quality submissions from both emerging and established writers. We publish craft essays and interviews as well as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—and we want to see the best work you have to offer, regardless of form, style, or subject matter. We prefer writing that is accessible, and experimental work that shows an awareness of what is being subverted and why. We value fiction and poetry that is aware of the history that has come before it. Submission Window/Type: 5/15-8/15,  Submittable ($4). Guidelines. Genre: All genres

Gulf Stream Literary Magazine From the Journal: Gulf Stream Literary Magazine champions vibrant and eclectic literature and art. Based in beautiful Miami, Florida, we publish emerging and established writers from the USA and beyond. We love a wide range of genres and styles, especially writing that is innovative in form and progressive in content.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-11/1 & 1/1/-3/1, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Harpur Palate From the Journal: Fiction—We’re interested in a wide spectrum of fiction, anything from traditional literary fiction to experimental fiction. We value writers who take chances and demonstrate confidence... Send us works that both define and redefine what fiction is. Poetry—We are looking for poems with fresh perspectives that surprise us, poems that draw us in and make of us commiserators or co-conspirators. Our favorite poems have a strong lyric voice and a sense of urgency that drives the poem forward toward a conclusion that feels simultaneously inevitable and unexpected. That urgency can derive from the speaker’s audibly intense desire to communicate or a sense of play, tracking the speaker’s ideas as they move associatively and intuitively from one to the next. We love poems that dive deeply into the speaker’s psychological response to a situation, idea, or what Richard Hugo calls the “triggering subject.” We love poems that dramatize the brain’s work of making meaning. Nonfiction—I’d love to have personal essays from diverse voices. In addition, I’d like to see some more experimental creative nonfiction, especially hybrid works. I want pieces by writers who have a unique perspective and a strong voice.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-11/15 & 2/1-4/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Hayden’s Ferry Review From the Journal: Hayden’s Ferry Review looks for well-crafted work that takes risks, challenges readers, and engages us emotionally and artistically. A small portion of our publication is solicited from established authors, while the majority of our contributors are chosen from the thousands of manuscripts we receive each year.

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-5/31, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres
HeartWood From the Journal: HeartWood, an online literary magazine in association with West Virginia Wesleyan's Low-Residency MFA program, publishes twice yearly. We are interested in writing that pushes into, dares to reveal, its own truth, that takes emotional risks, that gets to the heart of the matter. We do love Appalachian voices, but we enthusiastically encourage writers from all backgrounds to submit. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres:All genres
Hoxie Gorge Review From the Journal: Hoxie Gorge Review is committed to publishing innovative poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by both emerging and established contemporary writers. We aim to provide a platform for writing that is urgent and engaging, regardless of theme or style. To that end, we seek work that compels us, that challenges us, that breaks us open. Our only requirement is quality. Send us your best. Submission Window/Type: 3/1-5/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All Genres

Hunger, The From the Journal: The Hunger publishes visceral writing. The theme of “hunger” is not confined only to food, but hungers and thirsts of all kinds: the craving for connection, the human need to be filled or emptied, the devastating desires that define our most alive moments. Hungers can be sexual, romantic, familial, individualistic, spiritual, creative, sorrowful, conflicted, humanistic, and/or existential. We are excited by the lyrical, the experimental, the strange, the uncomfortable, the vulnerable, and just plain, motherfucking honesty. Send us work that bleeds. We want to be devoured.

Submission Window/Type: 11/1-1/1 & 3/1-5/1, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction/Prose, Prose Poetry

Indefinite Space From the Journal: from minimalist to avant-garde---open to innovative, imagistic, philosophical, experimental creations--- poetry drawings collage photography. Guidelines do not exist.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines (do not exist).

Genres: All genres

Indicia From the Journal: indicia enjoys feeling out the lengths to which language can be stretched, whether to convey a feeling, an experience, a humorous observation, a dire lesson, or whatever else a literary spirit needs to say. indicia has no easy answers. indicia likes the invention of new forms, the reinvention of old forms, and the innovation of anti-forms (not sure what that means). indicia drools over weird visuals, abstract shapes, emotional figures, or paintings of sad music. Interview at Six Questions

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

Inflectionist Review, The From the Journal: The Inflectionist Review is a small press publishing stark and distinctive contemporary poetry that fosters dialog between the reader and writer, between words and their meanings, between ambiguity and concept. Each issue gathers established and emerging voices together toward the shared aim of unique expression that resonates beyond the author’s world, beyond the page, and speaks to the universality of human language and experience. The Inflectionist Review has a strong preference for non-linear work that carefully constructs ambiguity so that the reader can play an active role in the poem. In general, we commend the experimental, the worldly and universal, and eschew the inane, trendy, and overly personal. Work that reveals multiple layers with further readings. Work that speaks to people across borders, across literary and cultural boundaries, across time periods, is more likely to fascinate us (and the reader). Though the editors have a special interest in shorter poems, we are open to longer works that adhere to our general philosophy. Multi-sectioned or thematically-linked poems are also encouraged.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Interim From the Journal: Interim seeks writing that engages the perilous conditions of life in the 21st century as they pertain to issues of social justice and the earth, writing that demonstrates an ethos that considers the human condition in inclusive love and sympathy while offering the same in consideration of the planet. Because we believe that the truth is always experimental, we especially appreciate work with innovative approaches. Interim is a publication supported by the Black Mountain Institute and has been housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, since the 1960s.

Submission Window/Type: 6/1-9/1 & 12/1-3/1, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Into the Void From the New Pages: Published out of Dublin, Ireland, Into the Void pushes the boundaries of comfort and vulnerability. Nothing is safe or simple. Through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art, this issue doesn’t try to clean up the rough edges of literature. Into the Void refuses to apologize for the imperfections, and vulnerabilities.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (“We Are ANTIFA” special issue deadline 7/31/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Invisible City From the Journal: Invisible City is an online publication of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. Submit work that encourages us to see the world from new perspectives and different angles, ones that we may not have previously considered or imagined. 

Submission Window/Type: TINY WINDOW—5/5-5/10, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

iō Literary Journal From Duotrope: IOLit aims to embrace all forms of creative writing and artistic expression, even those works that expand the genre beyond the conventional interpretations. In doing this, we hope to showcase the spectrum of experience of all people, especially those in underrepresented groups whose voices are silenced in mainstream culture. Diversity is present on the surface but it isn’t until perspectives are bent that inequality becomes visible. Seven diverse women came together in 2018 to found IOLit, a journal that will highlight the voices that do not conform to traditional expectations of creativity.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Jet Fuel Review From Duotrope: We’re looking for all work sent to us to have a unique aesthetic. In other words, your work should be something that can only come from you, that stems from who you are and what you believe. We’re looking for work that articulates itself well and says something interesting in its syntax, metaphors, ideas, and images. We are looking for authors who take risks with language and who write linguistically interesting pieces. When it comes to art, we expect the same kind of risk-taking when it comes to color, design, and technique.

Submission Window/Type: 8/15-10/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres
jubilat From Duotrope: From the first issue onward, jubilat has aimed to publish not only the best in contemporary American poetry, but to place it alongside a varied selection of reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists. Rather than section off these varieties of work, the magazine creates a dialogue that showcases the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, and how experiments with language and image speak in a compelling way about who we are. Submission Window/Type: 10/1-12/31, Submittable ($3, no fee submission window in Sept. & Jan.). Guidelines. Genres: Poetry, Criticism

Juked From the journal: We don’t adhere to any particular themes or tastes, but some people tell us they see one, so perhaps there’s something there? Our past contributors include Aimee Bender, Emma Straub, Kevin Wilson, Michelle Latiolais, Stephen Graham Jones, Claudia Smith, Blake Butler, Paul Griner, Shane Jones, Justin Taylor, and many others. Published works have been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s New Sudden Fiction, Best New Poets, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, and elsewhere.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 
Juke Joint From Duotrope: The juke joint has always been a place beyond the margin, somewhere along the line. Barrelhouses of the South, juke joints served as a place for sharecroppers & plantation workers to socialize & celebrate counterculture in a society marred by Jim Crow. Today, there are hardly a handful left, most of them in the Mississippi Delta. At Juke Joint, we aim to uphold this spirit of defiance, striving to find unconventional Southern (& non-Southern) voices in poetry. Send us your lyrical, your narrative, your found, your erased, your not-quite-sure-it's-a-poem poem(s). Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year, next issue deadline August 15), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Poetry, Hybrid

K’in From the Journal: Experimental, traditional, playful, prayerful, celebratory, challenging, all that makes us.human. Try us. Show us a new way to tell one of the millions of stories under that glorious sun. We welcome short stories of all shapes and sizes, from the mind-blowing traditional story to fiction that blurs the lines between forms, genre fiction, experimental fiction, etc. We also welcome flash and micro fiction.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Kissing Dynamite From Duotrope: Twelve poems each month—Kissing Dynamite curates compact issues that honor the thematic threads presented by contributing poets. Our goal is to present multiple facets of a theme/topic/issue to break the narrative of "the single story."

Submission Window/Type: 1-10 of every month, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Lake Effect From the Journal: Fiction—Lake Effect is looking for stories that emerge from character and language as much as from plot. Lake Effect does not, in general, publish genre fiction, but literary fiction. Poetry—Lake Effect is looking for poems that demonstrate an original voice and that use multi-layered, evocative images presented in a language shaped by an awareness of how words sound and mean. Each line should help to carry the poem. Nonfiction—Lake Effect is looking for well-crafted and lively literary or personal essays. We are not looking for literary criticism, but essays that engage literature in the context of a lived life are certainly welcome.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Lammergeier From the Journal: We here at Lammergeier look for the beautiful vulture, the wonder uncovered digging through the grotesque, the sustaining viscera inside the carcass. We are here for work that confounds taxonomy and welcome experimentation with form and genre. We are also open to speculative elements in work so long as they are done with artistic intent. We seek poetry of contradiction: the poetry that finds the intimacy in the grotesque, the grotesque in the intimate, the vulnerability and fist fight. Send us work with language that crackles, work that makes us gasp and wonder how we survived this long without it. Send us work you worry about sending anywhere else. Send us work with with talons. In form and content, we want fiction that defies expectations. Send us poems disguised as prose, genre stories that make us question what literature can do, and sentences too beautiful to read just once. We’ll devour them all.

Submission Window/Type: Quarterly (January-Feburary, April-May, July-August, and October-November), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Lana Turner From the Journal: We look for work that is alive, rare, difficult, arresting, you know the list. There are no new criteria and the old ones have been rehearsed ad nauseam. So let that be. Much of the poetry in each issue is poetry, in Yeats’s plain, simple sense, of “the whole personality”—wholly engaged if not unified. We are somewhat elastic, however, when it comes to partial poetry if it is experimental or political: not that it can’t be both. The first, the experimental, is crucial, because the art must be periodically radicalized, kicked about in order to stay alert; and the second, the political, just as crucial, because “the state is an extraordinary machine,” as Badiou says in his new book, The Rebirth of History, “for manufacturing the inexistent.”

Submission Window/Type: 1/1-3/31, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism 

LandLocked From the Journal: We are interested in work that pushes the boundaries of tradition, both in content and form. Poetry—We seek strong imagery and language that moves us and can reveal power even in quietness. We are open to your experimentations and are especially interested in work that is speculative, narrative, surreal, fragmented, and lyrical. Fiction—We want fiction that deploys sharp detail, unique and complex characters, beautiful language, and a memorable voice. We want stories of literary quality and encourage fantastical and speculative literature. Most importantly, though, we want immersive storytelling that lingers with the reader long after the last page. Nonfiction—We love being challenged and surprised, both in content and in form. We are looking for pieces that push us to see through a particular lens and experience otherwise underrepresented perspectives. We are especially drawn to pieces that challenge the boundaries of the genre, incorporate fictional and poetic elements, and make us question how “creative” nonfiction can be. We want to see rich, immersive, and personal narratives; in other words, we are not looking for essays (unless it’s a lyrical essay).

Submission Window/Type: 9/16-4/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres
LIT From the Journal: LIT is a biannual literary magazine published by The New School Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, which promotes innovative writing and art via print and digital publishing. We’re interested in many types of fiction at Lit, up to and including work that can be called "experimental." But what we are most excited to publish are simply stories we haven’t read before. At Lit, we are interested in hybrid prose that is aware of the tension between fiction and non-fiction, and wants to exploit, reify, and expand those terms, but not be contained by them. If it’s too prose-y to be a poem, but not clearly a short story or an essay, it might belong here. But this is not a category for the unsure – on the contrary, the best examples of hybrid prose are always the most deliberate.

Submission Window/Type: Reads 1/1-5/31 & 9/1-12/31 (open all year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Lost Balloon From the Journal: We publish one new piece every Wednesday. There are no theme or genre restrictions, but we want your best. Give us work that entertains and challenges, that pushes boundaries and breaks hearts. The site’s name was inspired by those small and sad but whimsical moments in life: the birthday balloon that slips from your fingers and floats into the horizon, or the dropped ice cream cone.

Submission Window/Type: The first week of every month (w/exceptions, this year no subs until 9/1), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Los Angeles Review From the Journal: We’re looking for hard-to-put-down shorts under 1000 words as well as sequences of such shorts and/or stand-alone lengthier stories up to 4,000 words–and regardless of length, we always hope to see lively, vivid, excellent literary fiction. Please submit 3-5 poems that will surprise us, wow us, and make us wish we’d written them ourselves. We are open to form, free verse, prose poems, and experimental styles. Our only criterion is quality. Please submit an essay, memoir, or commentary told as compelling, focused, sustained narrative in a distinctive voice, rich with detail. Send 1,000-4,000 words or delight us with flash nonfiction that cat-burgles our expectations.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Lotus-eater From the Journal: Lotus-eater is an online literary magazine based in Rome. Our aesthetic is dark, eclectic, often experimental. We are interested in daring, unusual writing and striking images. Before you submit, please take a look at the previous issues in order to get an idea of the kind of writing we are looking for. We CRAVE originality and experimentation.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Lunch Ticket From the Journal: Established in 2012, Lunch Ticket strives to balance cutting edge literary and visual art with conversations about social justice and community activism. The name Lunch Ticket pays homage to Antioch University’s historic focus on issues that affect the working class and underserved communities. We publish writers and artists who have been marginalized and underrepresented, or historically misrepresented, and welcome work that engages with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (January & July for Amuse Busche online, March & September for print), Submittable (No Fee & $3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Madcap Review From the Journal: Madcap is a semiannual journal of literature and art. As our name indicates, we embrace the impulsive, the reckless, and the lively, but we also have great respect for form and restraint. Founded in 2014 by a group of fiction writers, poets, and artists, Madcap is a platform for any and all forms of writing and art. We have no genre restrictions, because we believe that great writing isn’t easily categorized.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Temporarily closed until 9/1/20), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Mantle, The From the Journal: The Mantle welcomes poetry submissions from you, no matter who you are or where you live. Send your odd, poignant, beautiful poems. Send poems you’re proud of, whether raw, refined, or jagged.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Issue deadlines 7/7, 10/7, 1/7 & 4/7), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Map Literary From the Journal: Map Lit­er­ary is ded­i­cated to cel­e­brat­ing qual­ity works of new lit­er­a­ture. Rather than align­ing with any one aes­thetic, we aspire to pro­mote the finest provoca­tive writ­ing of our time, pub­lish­ing semi­an­nual issues of orig­i­nal fic­tion, poetry, and non­fic­tion in online for­mat, with occa­sional let­ter­press print sup­ple­ments. We are also inter­ested in advanc­ing works of art and elec­tronic media, espe­cially collage. We value provocative themes, experimental works, genre confoundings, fugue complexities, beautiful syntax, original voices, aesthetic risk-taking, creative research, ethnic hybridity, gorgeous paperweights. We dislike clichés, gimmicks, SUVs, righteousness, PowerPoint presentations, nuclear arsenals, talking heads.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($2, Nonfiction No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Maudlin House From the Journal: Maudlin House is a lit site devoted to all things literature. We welcome flash, poetry, and fiction submissions by both emerging, and established authors. We admire transgressive, absurdist, and minimalist literature but Maudlin House also encourages you to create work that challenges the idea of what literature is. This publication is by writers, for writers. Together we can make something weird.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit From the Journal: Meow Meow Pow Pow is looking for prose and poetry that is exciting, incinerating, inclusive, accessible, and audacious. We love unpublished writers just as much as we love published writers (sometimes even more so). MMPP is more likely to publish work that is provocative and invigorating rather than overly complicated pieces of pomposity. Excite us with your garden-fresh flash and titillate us with your gutsy poems. Let us home your vigorous words and create art to accompany them. And after we marry your wise wordery, we’ll bring the lit to the great outdoors.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently Closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres (short) 
Michigan Quarterly Review From the Journal: The flagship literary journal of the University of Michigan, our magazine embraces creative urgency and cultural relevance, aiming to challenge conventions and address long-overdue conversations. As we continue to promote an expansive and inclusive vision, we seek work from established and emerging writers with diverse aesthetics and experiences. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Current deadline 11/30), Submittable ($3). Guidelines. Genres: All genres

Miracle Monocle From the Journal: We humbly request that you send us work that enlivens us. Remind us why we love to read; remind us why the rules that govern the page sometimes invite revision. Send us work that brings us the news of the world, work that challenges us to reassess our expectations; send us forms old and new, fresh collaborations, re-invigorations of the word. Our issues tend to be big and eclectic. We draw at least half (and usually more than half) of our selections from our pool of unsolicited submissions. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Reopens 1/2021), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres

Mississippi Review From the Journal: MR is now in its fifth decade, and while adapting to this up-and-coming generation of writers and readers, the magazine continues to publish writing that is offbeat and ahead of the curve

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-1/1 (Only reads submissions for their annual contest, publishing finalists and winners), Submittable ($15). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Modern Poetry Quarterly Review From Duotrope: Modern Poetry Quarterly Review is an online journal with an annual print anthology that publishes poetry relevant to the current and the now. We seek to represent the collective thoughts and ideas of our generation in the 21st century. Basically any poetry form is accepted. We will publish experimental with the traditional, humorous with the serious, short with the long. All a poem needs is to be new in style or idea that past poets have not written.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

mojo From the Journal: mojo is the online literary journal of Wichita State University. We’re dedicated to the revolution of literary spaces—the breaking of conventions, the exploration of provocation, the inclusion of all voices. Established, emerging, or identities often marginalized by our society’s narrative—we want your work. Bring on your off-the-wall, genre-mixing, mad-scientist-experimentation of the written word. Bring on your wildest imaginings of just how far you can push form, structure, the foundation of human moments and what it means to share them. Bring on your best. We don’t sacrifice quality for novelty. The best way to see what we’re interested in? Read our past issues.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year—next issue ‘deadline’ 7/31/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Molotov Cocktail, The From the Journal: The Molotov Cocktail is interested in volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves. While literary fiction is certainly welcomed, The Molotov Cocktail isn’t some erudite journal that will only accept stories with at least five layers of metaphor. We want your action, we want your rotten characters, we want viscera. While genre pieces are permissible, anything that is reliant on genre convention over story will not be looked kindly upon. It’s all about language and story. We encourage surrealist and experimental stuff, so hit us with your best shot, but avoid the following genres because we’ll reject them outright: romance, children’s or young adult, swords and sorcerers brand of fantasy.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Monkeybicycle From the Journal: Founded in 2002 in Seattle, WA, Monkeybicycle has continued to publish the absolute highest quality in a wide range of literary categories. Twice, works we’ve published were selected for inclusion in the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies and have a selection in the 2018 Best Small Fictions anthology. (from Fiction Writer’s Review) No, it’s not the usual Mount Rushmore of Pushcart Winners. It’s better. From that odd name onward, Monkeybicycle isn’t about living up to classic academic ideals—it’s about extending them with no fear of appealing to the mass. Though they publish plenty of serious literary stories, they’re also unabashed fans of funny writing, which in stuffy literary circles is just as bad as getting caught reading Fifty Shades of Grey... the journal’s printed stories and poetry continue to provide a playground in which the editors experiment and innovate...

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction, One sentence stories

Mortar Magazine From the Journal: MORTAR MAGAZINE evolves the idea that writing can and should be incisive, coming in at the edges, doing that elusive something that makes us question motive, genre, meaning, or narrative itself. While we accept any prose or poetry submissions, we have a soft spot in our hearts for of-the-moment writing, in the sense of experimental forms and new voices. As a visual, mortar exists on the boundaries of the big, the obvious, the flashier brick. Mortar occupies the outskirts. Ideally we won’t be able to articulate—or at least anticipate—what we want: in a nutshell, we’re hoping to be surprised. We want the going-over-the-top-of-the-rollercoaster intake of breath, the thrill that comes from the writing that is confidently new and clearly on a forward trajectory.

Submission Window/Type: June, Submittable (No Fee & Tip Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Mud Season Review From the Journal: Mud Season Review is an international literary journal run by members of the Burlington Writers Workshop, a free writing workshop based in Vermont. Our staff is dedicated to creating a journal that mirrors the openness of the workshops, in which writers of all genres support each other’s love of writing and reading, provide vibrant, kind, insightful feedback, forge significant creative relationships, and demonstrate that the pursuit of excellence in their craft doesn’t have to be formal, exclusive or anonymous. We aim to publish strong, skillful writing from far and wide, and hope always to include voices new to us and new to publication.We seek deeply human work that will teach us something about life, but also about the craft of writing or visual art; work that is original in its approach and that in some way moves us. Publishing and celebrating a diverse range of voices is important to us

Submission Window/Type: 6/1-6/30, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

mutiny! From the Journal: here at mutiny! we don’t like rules.  things we do like are: crayons / tantrums / secrets / salt / science experiments /  tattoos / laundry lists / sticky notes / lines of code / vinyl / neon / b & w / mirrors / vintage furniture / righteous profanity / loud noises / we are looking for short poetry and prose that refuses to apologize. ​show us why you're not sorry.

Submission Window/Type: Currently closed (Read during Spring last year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Muzzle Magazine From the Journal: Muzzle seeks to promote writing of revolution and revelation. While all of our editors have their own likes and dislikes, our collective goal is not to showcase one particular aesthetic, but rather to press our ears against the rustling beyond. With healthy doses of both reverence and mischievousness toward literary minds that have come before us, we are obsessed with asking what beauty can and will be. ​Looking beyond Ezra Pound’s slogan of “Make it new,” we are looking for people who are making the new.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (currently 6/15-8/1), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Nashville Review From the Journal: Nashville Review seeks to publish the best work we can get our hands on, period. From expansive to minimalist, narrative to lyric, epiphanic to subtle: if it’s a moving work of art, we want it. We hope to provide a venue for both distinguished and emerging artists.

Submission Window/Type: 1/1-1/31, 5/1-5/31, 9/1-9/30, Submittable (No Fee & Tip-Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

New Ohio Review From the Journal: We publish work that addresses the purpose and mystery of being, in any shape or form. We appreciate humor, if it's got depth. We appreciate experimental work, if it's not gimmicky. What we look for is a voice that is genuine, speaking with some degree of lucidity and intelligence about something that feels urgently felt.

Submission Window/Type: 9/15-12/15 & 1/15-4/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction
NightBlock From the Journal: Our aim in selecting submissions for publication is to prioritize writing or art that considers the urgent present, the difficult past, and the impossible future. We want well-crafted, deeply considered art. We want hard-to-categorize, never-before-seen, slight-of-hand magic tricks.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Night Music Journal From the Journal: Night Music is an inclusive journal of poetry, nonfiction, mixed genre, and reviews. Writers of color, LGBTQIA writers, and writers who have ever been shushed are especially encouraged to submit. The more voices, the richer the music. This night isn’t silent.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Ninth Letter From the Journal: We are interested in prose and poetry that experiment with form, narrative, and nontraditional subject matter, as well as more traditional literary work.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-2/28 (No fiction in December), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

NOON Annual From Good Reads: NOON is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed literary annual, founded in 2000 by American author Diane Williams. It is noted for its cutting-edge fiction, arresting art portfolios and is also renowned for its elegant design. "Erudite, elegant and stubbornly experimental."- Rumaan Alam, The New York Times. "A beautiful annual that remains staunchly avant-garde in its commitment to work that is oblique, enigmatic and impossible to ignore...stories that leave a flashbulb's glow behind the eyes even as they resist sense."- Rachel Syme, The New York Times.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year). SNAIL MAIL ONLY (Postage fee varies). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction 

Normal School From the Journal: We are nestled happily into the California State University at Fresno like a comfy spore in a benign and mighty lung. We dig quirky, boundary-challenging, energetic prose and poetry with innovations in content, form, and focus, which isn’t actually as high-falutin’ as it sounds. We’re just sort of the lit mag equivalent of the kid who always has bottle caps, cat’s eye marbles, dead animal skulls, little blue men and other treasures in his pockets.

Submission Window/Type: 2/1-4/1, Submittable ($2). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Ocean State Review From the Journal: The Ocean State Review is a prominent and visible yearly print journal, and includes the work of nationally and internationally recognized writers. We’ve recently published writing by Charles Bernstein, Tomaz Salamun, Nina Cassian, Dacia Maraini, Donald Revell, Patricia Smith, Tim O’Brien, Cole Swensen, Tiphanie Yanique, Robin Hemley, Amina Gautier, Timothy Liu, and others.

Submission Window/Type: 11/4-4/15, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Offing, The From the Journal: The Offing publishes work that challenges, experiments, provokes — work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions. The Offing is a place for new and emerging writers to test their voices, and for established writers to test their limits.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling/varies (fiction 7/15/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction, Micro, Humor and more

Okay Donkey From the Journal: Our donkey likes to read the odd, the off-kilter, and the just plain weird. If it has animals in it, even better. The donkey likes to read about animals. The donkey likes things that are funny, things that are sad, and things that are both funny and sad at the same time. The donkey especially loves to read the experimental, surreal, and genre-bending.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

One (Jacar Press) From an interview with Trish Hopkinson: We are looking for your best work. Don’t send us a poem you think is pretty good. You can only submit one poem, so give us the one you secretly hoped would be published in The New Yorker. Stylistically we think our selections are wide-ranging. We don’t subscribe to any particular aesthetic. That said, it does seem we like poems that have an emotional component while at the same time show skill with the music and meter of language. We want poems that are going to stand up to multiple readings, and will last over time–commentaries on contemporary events often seem dated a year after they were composed. Make sure what you have to say isn’t narrowly rooted in its time. We like poems that matter, poems that delight the tongue and ear, engage the mind, move the heart.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines..

Genres: Poetry

Otoliths From the Journal: Otoliths is open to electronic submissions of textual poetry, vispo, fiction, essays, photographs, art & any combination of the above. Kinetic or moving pieces are also welcome provided they are pre-coded & can be temporarily demonstrated somewhere. Simultaneous submissions are not welcome.

Submission Window/Type: Once per Quarter, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Oxidant | Engine From the Journal: Oxidant|Engine is a journal of contemporary poetry. We have eclectic tastes. It's not that we don't have aesthetic preferences; it's just that we can't settle on what they are.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email  (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pacifica Literary Review From the Journal: For reference, here is a brief and incomplete list of things which do not give us the feels: when the son does not want to be like the father, 3 trees + 2 bodies of water = beauty, gesturing towards vulnerability without being vulnerable, your penis, preciousness, things that are made to be knocked over, and knockoffs. Here’s what we want: your best work: if your bio is more impressive than your writing, it’s going to anger up our blood. You think we’re pikers over here or something? We’re not pikers over here. We want things that are interesting to read, because we have all read enough of that one story/poem (you know the one) in your workshops and we are all bored with it. We want unique voices and risky writing; send your predictable stuff to those hoary old journals who’ve been printing the same thing since 1970.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Packingtown Review From the Journal: Comrades, sisters, brothers, and members of the human family, we have long joined the struggle to destroy the imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. We resist sentimental urges of the national and canonical. We refuse joyless institutional programs. Non-affiliated and promiscuous, we embrace translation, adaptation, outsider art, and experimentation. We offer radical solidarity with the subaltern. Skeptical, paradoxical, and always with a sense of humor, we believe that another world is possible.Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email  (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Painted Bride Quarterly From the Journal: Painted Bride Quarterly, established in Philadelphia in 1973, is one of the country’s longest running literary magazines. PBQ is a community-based, independent, non-profit literary magazine published online and in print, making it accessible to a broad and diverse audience. This hybrid format allows for immediacy, accessibility and permanence simultaneously. The book allows us to transcend any questions of legitimate publication for authors, while serving our contributors with the timely, and easily shared, publication of their work online. PBQ does not limit itself to specific regions or genres, and we publish poetry, fiction, and prose from emerging and established authors from across the country and around the world. The combination of PBQ’s volunteer editorial board and ever-changing student staff makes its published voice unique.

Submission Window/Type: 5/1-5/31, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Palaver From the Journal: Palaver is extremely interested in exploring interdisciplinarity, not only in content, but also in form... Palaver seeks submissions that defy the confines of a single discipline and explore multiple disciplinary and creative influences. We publish creative and research-based work that values the nonrestrictive and converges versatility, skill, and ingenuity in the service of its subject. Palaver is a venue for this innovative work, promoting the visionary talents of contributors across an array of interests. We encourage palaver within your work.

Submission Window/Type: 2/15-9/14, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pank From the Journal: Founded in 2006 by M. Bartley Seigel and Roxane Gay, PANK Magazine is a literary magazine fostering access to innovative poetry and prose, publishing the brightest and most promising writers for the most adventurous readers. Up country, to the end of the road, to a far shore and the edge of things, to a place of amalgamation and unplumbed depths, a place inhabited by contradiction, quirk and startling anomaly, where the known is made and unmade, and where unimagined futures are born, PANK. We’re invested in sharp, honest, beautiful writing. Strangeness is a small god. We’re particularly interested in reading creative non-fiction and fiction, but please send poems, too.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable ($5). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Passages North From the Journal: Passages North, the literary journal sponsored by Northern Michigan University, has published short fiction, poetry, and and creative nonfiction since 1979.. (Editor’s note: since that isn’t terribly descriptive, here’s this from a relevant New Pages review) This annual journal sponsored by Northern Michigan University publishes short stories, fiction flashes, modular and traditional essays, and poetry—loads and loads of poems of every possible breed: ghazals, sonnets, pantoums, free-verse, coupleted-cantations—diversity in form, theme and content receive open-armed welcomes at Passages North. From Pushcart winners to first-timers, from experimental to toe-the-liners, this volume is hefty hefty hefty, and by following the editorial compass of publishing only what deserves “merit,” they have produced a book to please the masses.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-4/15, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Peatsmoke Journal From the Journal: POETRY—Nothing excites us more than a stellar combination of image and sound. We’re interested in how the two collide and inform each other and the work they’re doing. Images that have energy are the best images. Sound and form that follows content are the best sounds and forms. We want to be able to understand what’s going on in your poem by the weight and lilt of it in our mouths. We read everything aloud. We pay attention to line breaks. If we’ve seen it before, we don’t want to publish it. Please send up to three poems of any length. FICTION—We’re into fiction that explores the human condition with empathy and curiosity. We love reading fully realized characters who are pushed and challenged, and clear, carefully-crafted sentences that bring them to life. Speculative, experimental, and flash fiction are absolutely welcome here. Please, no work over 7,000 words, and send only one short story or three flash pieces. NONFICTION—We love nonfiction pieces we can’t classify. If it’s a brief flash prose poem using academic language that’s also a sonnet, we want to read it. We most admire essays that (like poetry) emphasize image, that show the process of discovery.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee & $3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

perhappened mag From the Journal: perhappened mag is an online literary magazine, founded by editor-in-chief isaura ren in 2020. "perhappened" is a portmanteau of "perhaps" and "happened," which highlights its focus on those peculiar experiences that make you wonder: "was that real, or did i just imagine it?" perhappened lives for your uncertain and surreal. we crave the frayed edge of memory. we embrace poetry and prose, but especially cherish prose poems that toe the line of creative nonfiction. dos: risk-taking, genre-blending, picture-painting, navel-gazing works are always appreciated. we find beauty in the odd and oft-overlooked. we want your lived experiences, your can't-believe-that-happeneds, your moments of self-reflection. each monthly issue of perhappened mag follows a particular theme/prompt.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Window for the theme “Heatwave” ends 8/7/20), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Permafrost From the Journal: As the editors of the farthest north literary magazine, we’ve chosen an unconventional, expansive place to live. That, too, is what we seek in your submissions. This is especially to say: we are not particularly interested in reading obvious, Alaska-themed work (i.e. snowflakes, polar bear romances, and your tormented ice-capped heartcicles). We get plenty of polar saturation from the Great White North everyday. We want the far-reaching, skittish, and confused/confusing. We want the crystalline and devastating. We want the sickly, the sweet, but not the sickly sweet. We want things to get ugly, or maybe beautiful. Give us the stuff you tucked away in the folder you hesitate to open on the weekdays—the pieces you scour and revise during weekend binges. You know, the intense 3am-on-a-Saturday, ersatz pieces. Push us with your intricate language, your lyrical alchemy. That’s what we’re looking for. Let’s get weird with it.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (8/15-12/15 for Print, 1/15-5/15 for their web issue), Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres (Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Hybrid, Artwork)

petrichor From the Journal: A journal of text & image, petrichor publishes your double mesostics, collage clips, double/triple haibun, asemic cryptolectics, glitching phrases, semiotic pictographs, or just something new. Old school remixes for the digital age will not go unspun. GIFpoetics & code tomes welcome, too. We welcome underrepresented voices and unheard approaches to poetics and the melding of text & image. And lately? We’re feeling angry. If you aren’t seeing you out there, send yourself here.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Next opens on 7/1/2020), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

'Pider (ed. note: Reading the journal is the best path) From the Journal: A place of work that lets. 'Pider is a stage in which what is meant is fully understood internally as migration toward expression in communal constructs.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pidgeonholes From the Journal: We seek to publish work with the grit of heavy-duty sandpaper: words that will tear and scar. Send us your literary, speculative, experimental, or absurdly unclassifiable, just make it bold and beautiful. What to send us: Fearless fiction, nonfiction, poetry and artwork. Literary, speculative, experimental, or absurdly unclassifiable, just make it bold and beautifully written. Here is their interview at Six Questions For.

Submission Window/Type: Dates 1-10 of every month,  Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

pif Magazine From the Journal: The content we seek is aimed at aspiring and working writers alike. Free thinkers. Art lovers. You. Pif may be a literary magazine, but it’s also a resource for readers and writers who—like us—are inspired by originality. To sum it all up plainly: we prefer individual creative vision over commercially accessible sameness; brevity is the soul of wit for our audience.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Hey Publisher Submission Form (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pinwheel From Duotrope: Pinwheel is a poetry journal. Our issues include poets at various stages of their writing careers, and we refuse to subscribe to one creative aesthetic over another. The majority of our issues come from solicitations, but we will occasionally post calls for unsolicited work. We want poems that will throw and take a goddamn punch. Rock the boat and burn the bridge, send us those poems.

Submission Window/Type: 5/1-5/31, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pithead Chapel From the Journal: At Pithead Chapel, we’re looking for engaging stories told in honest voices. Most of all, we want to feel something. We want to reach the last word and immediately crave more. We want your story to leave a brilliant bruise. Send us your gutsiest narrative and we’ll do our best to get your voice heard. Don’t be afraid to take chances, to surprise us. And, as always, revise, revise, and revise before sending something out.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry

Pleiades From the Journal: We are particularly interested in work that embraces risk and is lyrically inventive. We value work that gives voice to a range of lived experiences and employs a mastery of expression. Pleiades is looking for exceptional fiction, with a focus on well-developed characters, memorable language, provocatively-wrought subject matter, and immersive settings. While there are no length requirements, our journal has limited space, and manuscripts over 12,000 words will especially need to impress.

Submission Window/Type: June & December, CLMP Individual Server (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Poetry Magazine (yes, that Poetry Magazine they have probably the lowest acceptance rate of any magazine dedicated to poetry, but they also actively try to publish ‘new’ work.) From the Journal: Today, Poetry regularly presents new work by the most recognized poets, but its primary commitment is still to discover new voices: more than a third of the poets published in recent years have been new to the magazine. 

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Closed until August 1, 2020), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Portland Review From the Journal: Portland Review has been publishing exceptional prose, poetry, and art since 1956. For over sixty years, Portland Review has promoted the works of emerging writers and artists alongside the works of well-established authors. It is the editors' mission to publish unique voices and quality writing, and to communicate the multitudes of Portland by promoting the voices of those often pushed out of the literary mainstay. Portland Review aims to: showcase a diverse spectrum of literary and artistic engagement across genres and disciplines; encourage exploration and experimentation; make space for different approaches and vantage points;build literary community; acknowledge both the rich and conflicted history of Portland, as well as its connection to the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest and beyond; be a platform dedicated to issues of diversity, equity, and environmental awareness.

Submission Window/Type: 10/1-11/31 (Reads Book reviews all year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Posit From the Journal: Posit publishes a stimulating, dynamic selection of the finest new poetry, prose and visual art — accomplished, sophisticated work that may be eclectic in style but is always innovative, challenging, and aesthetically broadening. We believe in de-Balkanizing the literary and visual arts scenes by providing an aesthetically beautiful showcase for carefully curated, highly innovative work that is not circumscribed by affiliation with any specific aesthetic or artistic movement. We are looking for innovation, aesthetic vision, and accomplished craftsmanship. Our tastes are non-sectarian, with an interest in the experimental.

Submission Window/Type: 1/1-6/31 (limited # of submissions per month—if they’re closed check the beginning of the next), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Pouch From the Journal: Pouch is poetry from diverse sides- the little animals you really mean & a place to put them. Please note that happy laughs & melancholy shrugs interest us equally. We will, at least briefly, consider any or all styles & aesthetics.

We are fond of understated narratives. 

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email  (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Prairie Schooner From the Journal: Prairie Schooner publishes short stories, poems, interviews, imaginative essays of general interest, and reviews of current books of poetry and fiction. Scholarly articles requiring footnote references should be submitted to journals of literary scholarship. Prairie Schooner's intention is to publish the best writing available, both from beginning and established writers... we do not read simultaneous submissions.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-5/1, Submittable ($3). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Pretty Owl Poetry From the Journal: Send us your ugly crying in words, your winter wool unraveled into song, embers of thoughts left to cool in the hearth, and your tube top come undone. Send us something you’ve hid from your mother, you’ve recited over a grave, you’ve plucked from a feather, what it is you deeply crave. Send us a spell for binding or for undoing unholy attachments. Send us your color coded woes, what ignites you, your truth in visual form. Cut and cut the poems on the page. Bind them together with sweet rage. Drip and dip your words in lucid lines across our bellies. Send us your yellowed sweet tooth in a plastic bag. Or something volatile and violaceous, amarillo in yearning, amber in ambition, but grounded, rooted, in language that clings. Give us your hardest stinging slap that leaves us craving more. 

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee & Tip Jar). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Psychopomp From the Journal: The Psychopomp Magazine staff is committed to publishing original fiction that dares to redefine traditional storytelling and genre borders. While we like stories that treat the concepts of passages, transitions, and the state of being betwixt and between, we are open to all work regardless of theme. We are generally not looking for traditional realist fiction or pure hard genre. With that said, we are certainly open to publishing more traditional literary work or more hard genre (no fan fiction) so long as it’s really, really good. The best way to get a feel for what we publish is to read our issues. In addition to publishing fiction, we are also dedicated to showcasing art that echoes our themes.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines..

Genres: Fiction 

Puerto Del Sol From the Journal: For over half a century, Puerto del Sol has been dedicated to provide a forum for inventive and fresh prose, poetry, reviews, criticism, and artwork; and we strive to publish voices from emerging and established writers and artists. Most importantly, we pride ourselves in not following a standardized aesthetic—instead, we seek work that presents authenticity, sincerity, and respect.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Accepts all year, reads 8/1-4/31), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Quarter After Eight From the Journal: Quarter After Eight is an annual literary journal devoted to the exploration of innovative writing. We celebrate work that directly challenges the conventions of language, style, voice, or idea in literary forms.

Submission Window/Type: 10/15-4/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Quarterly West From the Journal: QW is looking for writing that is: Exciting. Challenging. Risky. Unpredictable. And Different. We could say what different means, but then we might receive a slew of submissions that are all different in the same way. Different will be victim to form—to the “fragment sentence,” “non-linear plot,” and “hybrid genre.” Different will be beholden to space, time, story, and moment. This does not seem the way to open the door for Different. We think Different doesn’t open a door, actually. Different doesn’t know doors or windows. Different stomps in. Maybe it seeps in. Sometimes, and in our favorite works, different is always already there and it strikes flint and blazes. This is what we look for. Send us your work. Seep in. Stomp in. Strike us. Set the familiar voice on fire.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 
Qwerty From the Journal: Our number one criterion, above all else, is mastery of craft. Though Qwerty has primarily published literary fiction and fine art, we have no qualms with publishing genre fiction that subverts convention, experimental work that inverts tradition in pursuit of innovative storytelling, or images that play on the senses in unusual ways. So go ahead: send us your stories that tap into the lower depths of the public consciousness. And also send us your poems and photos about the zombie apocalypse. So long as it’s exemplary, we’d be delighted to feature your work in future issues of Qwerty. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year, next deadline 9/30/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All genres

Rascal From the Journal: We want work that steals the breath out of your mouth, punches you in the gut, or both. Our overriding aesthetic is fourfold: 1) quality craftsmanship, 2) heightened attention, 3) good sense, and 4) good health. Work that induces care, enhances lives and contributes to vital efforts of sustainability is overwhelmingly encouraged. So is work that takes a broader-than-human perspective on its subject. Art for art’s sake isn’t for us. Work that exhibits a strong ethical spine is. Pith and concision will increase your chances. Hifalutin language should be used sparingly and only when essential to an aspect of craft. We love the concrete; we love the abstract; both should refuse to relinquish our attention. Passion and compassion are your guiding stars.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

RHINO Poetry From the Journal: RHINO Poetry occupies a niche somewhere between academia and the emerging poetry scene – devoted to creative work that tells stories, provokes thought, and pushes the boundaries in form and feeling – while connecting with our readers and audience. We invite traditional or experimental work reflecting passion, originality, artistic conviction, and a love affair with language.  We encourage emerging and established writers throughout the United States and around the world. Submissions are read by multiple editors with various tastes, all looking for quality work. Sometimes we call ourselves “eclectic” in the best sense of the word. We are proud of the content and variety of each issue we publish.

Submission Window/Type: 4/15-7/31, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Right Hand Pointing From the Journal [What they want]: Short, of course. Generally minimalist as a result. Highly imagistic, yet often containing an implied plot or at least a first- or third-person character. They revel in ambiguity but aren't ever deliberately obscure. Intellectual without being pretentious, original or novel without being consciously weird or eccentric.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Rivet From the Journal: Rivet: The Journal of Writing That Risks publishes new literary work that breaks from the confines of mainstream realism to surprise, delight, and challenge readers. We seek writing that crosses boundaries of form, content, genre, and style — either subtly or radically. If you have something that’s weird and interesting and strangely powerful but don’t know who would publish such a thing, it’s exactly what we want to read.

Submission Window/Type: Poetry, Hybrid, Nonfiction (All year), Fiction (March, July, November), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Rumble Fish Quarterly From the Journal: You’re a writer. We like writers. Writers like being read, and we like to read. Ergo (ergo!), if you send us writing, we’re going to see eye-to-eye pretty easily. Send us your coolest, deepest, most fun, most emotionally power-packed prose, poetry, or hybrid genre-bending triumph of autotheory. We’ll read it. We wanted writing that would entrance us, whisper in our ear at midnight, and seemingly infuse itself in our coffees and vodka tonics alike. It is nothing short of a rendering of artistic conscience of the highest order.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Rupture, The From The Journal: The Rupture published its first issue (as the Collagist) in August 2009 under the editorship of founding editor Matt Bell. New issues of the Rupture are published on the 15th of: February, April, June, August, October, and December.

Submission Window/Type: 3/1-7-/31 & 10/1-1/31, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

SAND From the Journal: Founded in 2009, SAND looks for submissions that push the boundaries of form, message, and voice in fresh and unpredictable ways—work that is haunting for its soul, edge, and truth. If you read SAND, you know that we are all about work that subverts. Fresh can be slow, sensitive can be rough, bold can be quiet. SAND is eclectic and publishes writing that takes risks, whether subtly or overtly, with voice, structure, character, or language.

Submission Window/Type: 7/29-9/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Sakura Review From the Journal: We at Sakura Review consider the page as a site of singularity and belonging, that threshold for history-weaving. We prize deft and thoughtful craft, and seek voices that call on us to stay and listen. In listening, we want our orbits shifted. We want your poetry or prose to surprise us and leave words ringing in our heads, and when we return, to reveal something new, something we’ve almost already known, something that tells of a world beyond. We’re committed to publishing writing from diverse voices and experiences, including work in translation. Writing that is brave, however quietly or radically.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction
Saint Ann’s Review From the Journal: The Saint Ann's Review publishes short fiction, poetry, essays, drama, novel excerpts, reviews, translations, interviews, and experimental works. Submission Window/Type: 9/1-7/31, Submittable ($3). Guidelines. Genre: All genres

SCAB From the Journal: Nick Zedd wrote in the manifesto of the Cinema of Transgression that “any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at”. He also proposed to “go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men” and that “there will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.” SCAB is a transgressive online (mostly but not exclusively fag)mag aiming to represent these very principles in the realm of visual arts and words alike. The motto might be something like this: the worse the better.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 
sea foam mag From the Journal: We love sparkly things, bees and fucking with social norms. We publish art of all mediums. We relish both intricate, aureate detail and punchy resistance. We live in the political, the personal and their abundant convergences. We fluctuate between fantastical enchantment, delicate minutia and gritty reality. We appreciate fluidity. We make room for people to feel what they're feeling. Predictably, we have a soft spot for oceans (and other bodies of water). Come to think of it, we have soft spots for a lot of things. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Individual Form (Online Issues-No Fee, Print Issues $3). Guidelines. Genres: All genres

Shallow Ends, The From the Journal: Because sometimes you want to dip your toes before diving in... The Shallow Ends aims to showcase both emerging and established poets by giving readers a glimpse into their work through the publication of one poet, one poem per week. The journal seeks to uplift and promote the work of its poets by creating a platform for all voices to speak and be heard.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry
Shift From the Journal: Shift is a student-run literary journal published by the Ringling College of Art and Design. We welcome new, emerging, and established writers and artists to submit fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, comics, graphic texts, and artwork. We want to see your best work, regardless of style, form, subject matter, or genre. We’re especially interested in literary oddities–text-based creations that push boundaries, challenge expectations, and defy easy categorization.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently 4/15-10/5/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All

Sidereal From the Journal: SIDEREAL IS LOOKING FOR YOUR STRANGE / BEAUTIFUL / BEAUTIFULLY STRANGE / SEND US YOUR FEAR / FEARLESSNESS / SEND US YOUR MOST HONEST / GUTSY / VULNERABLE / PIERCING / HOPEFUL / ANXIETY-RIDDEN FORESTS

Submission Window/Type: 5/1-9/1, 11/1-4/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Sierra Nevada Review From the Journal: We publish writing that leans toward the unconventional,  surprising, and risky. We appreciate experiments in form and content,  and prefer works whose meanings deepen on repeated readings.

Submission Window/Type: 9/15-2/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Sixth Finch From the Journal: Sixth Finch is an online journal of poetry and art, founded in 2008. We are committed to bringing the best in contemporary art and poetry to our readers at no cost. Poems from Sixth Finch have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Next deadline 7/6/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Shore, The From the Journal: The Shore is an online poetry publication seeking cutting, strange, and daring work from new and established poets alike. We want poems that explore the worlds of things and ideas, that recognize the liminality, the shifting of everything around us and our ability to name a thing whole. We want poems that press and push and ache and recede. Send us your best.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (Quarterly deadlines, next is 9/1/20), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

SOFTBLOW From the Journal: SOFTBLOW has been a home for contemporary poetry from all over the world since Sep. 2004. We strive to focus the eye back on the poem. This journal does not pretend to exist for a general reading audience. It is for unswerving lovers of poetry who also appreciate how far poetry has come over time.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry

Sonic Boom From the Journal Poetry—We want poems that speak to us at a molecular level, poems which challenge the intellect and draw on emotion at the same time, poems that dialogue with the reader. Give us the ordinary, the grandiose, the hauntingly beautiful, and avoid rhyme unless it’s the lifeblood of your piece. We love sharp, crisp images, engaging metaphors, and unpretentious poetry. We are not fond of poems that deliberately obfuscate. Make us mourn the short-lived love affair as we near the end of your submission packet. Give us your odes to brevity. We are open to publishing experimental poetry, including but not limited to found/remixed pieces. Prose—We encourage you to interpret this section in whatever manner pleases you. Send us your flash fiction pieces, creative non-fiction, vignettes, short scenes, hybrid forms, haibun, and tanka prose. We favour pieces that lean toward the prose poem rather than action-centred genre. A strong voice, the willingness to take risks with language, and attention to the odd but beautifully defining details are more likely to find a home. We are open to experimentation, but not at the cost of quality.

Submission Window/Type: 10/1-21, 2/1-21 & 6/1-6/21, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Japanese Literary Forms, Fiction

Sporklet From the Journal (Editor’s note: It’s best to read the journal to get a fee for what they publish): Write well. Be amazing. We're not interested in your feelings.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Spry From the Journal: Spry is a literary journal that features undiscovered and established writers’ concise, experimental, hybrid, modern, vintage or just plain vulnerable writing. This is a place for people who excel at taking risks, who thrive under pressure—for people whose words and rhythms are spry... We want to read your work if you’re an undiscovered writer, or if you’re established. We want to read your work if–and especially if–it is concise, experimental, hybrid, or flashy. If it’s modern. If it’s vintage. If it’s vulnerable. We want to read your work if it has guts.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All Genres

Stonecoast Review From the Journal: Stonecoast Review wants exciting work from both new and established writers. Our goal is to publish innovative and deeply resonant literature that embodies our core values of justice, awareness, and perspective. We seek unique, powerful writing that transports the reader to places unknown.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed according to their website), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Storm Cellar From the Journal: Storm Cellar is a nationally distributed literary arts magazine rooted in the Midwest, appearing in print and ebook editions. This is a journal of safety and danger. We want your prose, poems, chimeras, and ideas penned on envelopes in buses and train cars. The magazine aims to publish amazing work by new and established writers and artists, present a range of styles and approaches, and be as un-boring as it can. If you write one thing to be read while waiting for the all-clear to sound, send it here. This is a journal of safety and danger, in every sense. We want what we have not seen before.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (A limited # of no fee submissions each month & $3). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Streetcake From the Journal: we want to read poetry and fiction that surprises us, makes us laugh, looks downright weird and is a little out of the ordinary. we enjoy a range of innovative forms, including: visual poetry, unconventional ideas and presentations, hybrid forms, asemic writing, unique imagery, playing with forms and perspectives, non-linear writing, intermedia pieces, collages, and much more! so if your writing is a bit of an outcast, then join us

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Reopens August 1, 2020), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Sundog Lit From the Journal: We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color. We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished.

Submission Window/Type: 3/1-6/30 & 10/1-12/31. Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Surreal Poetics From the Journal: Surrealism is not a literary movement; it is a way of thinking and seeing . . . an alternate way of thinking and seeing that liberates. You must allow your senses and mind, your physical and spiritual, your conscious and unconscious, to coalesce. When one plus one always equals three, when you hear the sunrise sing, when you feel the green of the grass, when that which was invisible becomes revealed to you, then you will fully exist; you will truly experience life . . . you will be free. Surrealism continues to be expressed through many modes: painting, photography, cinematography, poetry, essay, word games, and so on. Surreal Poetics provides a space for people to achieve surreal freedom through poetry.

Submission Window/Type:Varies (Currently reading for the theme “The Penetrating Gaze” 6/15-7/15/20), Google Form (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

Survision From the Journal: SurVision is an international biannual online poetry magazine founded in Ireland in March 2017 as a platform for new Irish and international Surrealist and Irrealist poetry in English. The editor's taste is eclectic, and he aims to publish the best, most exciting innovative poetry of different trends and schools being written now.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Green Submission Platform (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Swamp Ape Review From the Journal: The Swamp Ape is a legend that reflects Florida—its mythology, its weirdness—as well as the human desire to create a narrative around that which we can’t explain. Swamp Ape Review exists to reflect this narrative in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and “swamp”—our fifth category for works that defy form to the extent that the piece’s creator might be unsure of where it belongs. Existing online and in print, we hope to publish work of all kinds—sculpture, plays, multimedia, dance, etc. Across all genres, we encourage pieces with a hybrid or non-traditional nature—works that subvert our expectations and unsettle our assumptions of what is possible.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Sweet From Duotrope: Sweet is an online literary magazine that publishes poetry, creative nonfiction, and anything that blurs the lines of those two genres. Sweet likes work that lingers in the mouth like an English toffee, work that is challenging and complex like the dark center of a tootsie pop, and work that satisfies like silky-smooth, Belgian chocolate.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

Sweet Tree Review From the Journal: Sweet Tree Review is a quarterly online literary and arts publication obsessed with ineffable connectivity. Confront us. Endear us. Scare us. Sadden us. Show us things we don’t understand; things we didn’t know we wanted to understand.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Next deadline 9/27/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 
S/WORD From the Journal: S/WORD seeks impossible expressions of beauty and power in language. Only in light of such failed attempts is it a worthwhile endeavour to cut and pierce, to show the malleable frailty of words. It is the firm belief in seeing the unseen, the contradictory capabilities and limitations of language. S/WORD is concerned with the dissolution of language, its breaking point, so that we may know the Word through apophasis. S/WORD exists as a record of these fragments, these shards, these partial reflections. It is a work in progress, a training ground for a community of artists. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All genres
The /tƐmz/ Review From The Journal: The /tƐmz/ Review is a literary journal based in London, Ontario that publishes fiction, poetry, and reviews. We publish 4 issues per year (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter), and we focus on publishing work from a diverse range of emerging and established voices. Our goal is to reflect a wide variety of editorial perspectives and publish an eclectic mix of writing. Our preference is for the strange, the experimental and the boundary-pushing, but we are open to a wide range of styles and voices. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Current deadline is 10/1/20), Moksha (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All genres

Third Coast From the Journal: Founded in 1995 by graduate students of the Western Michigan University English department, Third Coast is one of the nation’s premier literary magazines—and one of only a handful of nationally distributed literary magazines to regularly include four genres; Third Coast consistently publishes excellent and often award-winning fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama. [from Duotrope interview, they want:] Pieces straight from the gut, that make the author cringe to reread them. Possesses a fierce originality of voice and/or stance. No neat, bloodless submissions. Nothing easy. No imitation exercises. No unrevised flashes of inspiration. No excessive dialect. If there's a bird, or a horse, it had better be one heck of a necessary bird or horse.

Submission Window/Type: 9/15-5/1. Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry 
Threadcount From the Journal: Threadcount is a biannual online literary journal dedicated to hybrid forms, work that challenges genre boundaries and resists classifiable form, that experiments with texture and convention, that (like fabric) packs a lot in a limited space. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Prose Poetry, Hybrid

Timber Journal From the Journal: Run by the MFA candidates out of the University of Colorado-Boulder, we value work which pushes against boundaries: genre-bend, build or break form, confront the rules and voices of the canon. If you’re not flirting with failure or writing risky, it’s probably not for us. That said, experimental does not mean: intellectually elitist, inaccessible, or haphazard. Disorientation to the point of estrangement does not equal quality. Obtuse is not necessarily experimental.

Submission Window/Type: 9/1-12/1 & 3/1-5/1, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

Tinderbox Poetry Journal From the Journal: When we read submissions, we seek poems that give us a little shiver, poems that catch the light and compel us to look closer. We don't have restrictions on form or content, and we are interested in featuring poets at all stages of their career.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee, $3 & $5). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry
Tiny Molecules From the Journal: Tiny Molecules is quarterly online literary journal. We love flash, we love experimental, we love saying something big in a small space. We are every part of you written down. Tell us how to be human. Here is their Six Questions interview. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently open), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Flash Fiction, Prose Poetry
Tupelo Quarterly From the Journal: Tupelo Quarterly, a literary journal, extends and expands upon the vision of Tupelo Press, publishing work by emerging and established writers and artists of many sensibilities and styles. Tupelo Quarterly cultivates generous artistic community, celebrates intellectual curiosity and creative risk, and presumes abundance. We hold the gate open, not closed. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: All genres

Unbroken From the Journal: We seek prose poems and poetic prose. (We do not publish lined poetry.) Both traditional and innovative works are welcome. We want dark and disquieting, we want fanciful and funny, we want surreal and surprising. We want stunning and unusual imagery, and language that compels. The editors of Unbroken seek poetic prose and prose poems that transcend the boundaries of conventional story-telling.  Of course, we believe that submissions should be coherent and intelligible, but also that coherence can be achieved through style, tone, imagery, and even transgressive methods. Linear narratives with predictable situations and language will be discounted. We want prose that smolders in the ditch.

Submission Window/Type: Reads for 6 weeks then takes 6 weeks off (Next opening 7/30/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Variety Pack From the Journal: Fiction – We want something short that kicks through the door and pushes against the literary grain. We crave gripping, haunting work that is hard to turn away from once we dig in. We accept both genre and literary work. Poetry – For poetry, like our love of narrative prose, the aesthetic we have has a broad and inclusive atlas. We are creatures of eclectic habit. We want poems that redefine the traditional forms of poetry. Feel free to send us haikus, ghazals, senryus, sestinas, sonnets, elegies, odes, among others, as long as they fit the spirit of what we’re about. If your style leans more on the experimental side of the pond, send us your confessions, erasures, dada, maybe visual poetry, or anything you think will work against the norms of literary canon entirely, feel free to send it our way.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Vallum From the Journal: Vallum is interested in original and previously unpublished work. Ideal submissions are well-crafted, fresh and edgy. We are committed to enriching and continuing the tradition of poetry in the present day. We welcome submissions that deepen our understanding of what poetry is and can be. We are open to most styles, whether experimental or traditional.

Submission Window/Type: Varies (Last deadline 5/15/20), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 
Visitant From the Journal: "A visitant is a visitor from another realm. A visitant is a specter or a transitory creature, like a pilgrim or a migratory bird. Here at Visitant, we are borrowing from this concept with the goal of nurturing experimental writing and art. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genres: Poetry, Flash Fiction

Watershed Review From the Journal: Our mission is to publish literature and visual art illustrating diversity in thought and experience, capturing the crucial narratives and images of our current cultural moment, as well as awareness of the shifting edges of genre.

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-9/31 & 1/15-3/15, Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Waxwing From the Journal: Waxwing is a literary journal promoting the tremendous cultural diversity of contemporary American literature, alongside international voices in translation. We believe that American voices are, at their cores, both multicultural and multinational, and so the editors’ mission is to include American writers from all cultural identities — in terms of race, ethnicity, indigenous tribe, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, ability, language, religion, and region — alongside international voices, published bilingually.

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-4/30 (prose), August, September, November, January, and March (Poetry), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

West Wind Review About the Journal from Author’s Publish: West Wind Review is published annually at Southern Oregon University. They are a print publication that is established, experimental, and fun… The work they tend to publish is experimental and compelling. Their poems do not seem to focus on line breaks, but on ideas and the flow of language.

Submission Window/Type: 8/1-10/1, Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genre: Poetry, Fiction
What Are Birds From the Journal: We focus on representation and diversity--not only in our writers, but also in the forms, genres, and themes of the work that we publish. We are committed to publishing new and upcoming writers alongside established writers who are investigating what hybridity can mean within literature and art. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres
where is the river From the Journal: where is the river :: a poetry experiment is a poetry journal open to a variety of aesthetics, forms and experiences, with a preference towards showcasing work by emerging writers. There is no single path, nor any single way. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: Poetry
White Wall Review From the Journal: White Wall Review is the Journal of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. Since 1976, we have been the platform for a collective voice of subversive poets, writers and reviewers. We publish bold and necessary fiction, poetry and non-fiction by emerging and established writers from across North America. Submission Window/Type: Varies (Currently closed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres
Whisk(e)y Tit From the Journal: Whiskey Tit attempts to restore degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts. We are unwilling to sacrifice intellectual rigour, unrelenting playfulness, and visual beauty, often leading to texts that would otherwise be abandoned in a homogenised literary landscape. In a world gone mad, our refusal to make this sacrifice is an act of civil service and civil disobedience alike, and our work reflects this. We welcome like-minded readers and writers. We like: Weird, devious, melancholy, smart, experimental, and playful. We aim: To publish diverse voices. To publish work that responds to the mad world around us. To publish work that’s literary, but not your usual literary fare. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres
Wildness From Duotrope: Wildness wants work that evokes the unknown. The lostness; the distance. We want stories that linger just out of reach. We want to follow you into the blue that’s nestled inside your dreams...Wildness features formally inventive work by both established and emerging writers that embraces the mysteries of the self and the outside world. Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines. Genre: All genres

Witness From the Journal: Witness seeks original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography that is innovative in its approach, broad-ranging in its concerns, and unapologetic in its perspective. The magazine blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to their times. Our mission is to amplify extraordinary voices, feature writers from every part of the globe, and highlight pieces that speak to the present moment in an enduring and distinctive way. The magazine seeks to open up conversations surrounding oppression and transcendence, prejudice and compassion, fear and raw honesty. The editorial team is also proud to feature the work of emerging voices alongside that of established writers.

Submission Window/Type: 8/15-10/1 (themed) & 1/15-2/29 (unthemed), Submittable (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres

Word For/ Word From the Journal: Word For/ Word is open to all types of poetry, prose and visual art, but prefers innovative and post-avant work with an astute awareness of the materials, rhythms, trajectories and emerging forms of the contemporary.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: All genres 

Yalobusha Review From the Journal: Yalobusha Review is a journal of new writing, founded in 1995 and operated by the graduate writing program at the University of Mississippi. We seek to showcase work that alters or subverts mainstream forms of expression–work that is, in a broad sense, experimental, though that takes many forms. We believe the reading experience should be a kinetic one, and to that end, we favor art that has its own source of energy, drawn from tonal individuality, linguistic texture, and above all, a sense of exploration.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Yes, Poetry From the Journal: Yes Poetry is a magazine for whip-smart people who don't fit in, who want to challenge themselves, who are interested in activism, occultism, provocative art, feminism, queer community, camp + glam, and crave intellectual and creative stimulation. This is a magazine for outcasts - for the kind of people who don't settle, for the kind of people who dream, for the kind of people who want to make the world a better place for everyone. We are interested in surreal, bizarre, dark, compelling, unsettling poetry and short fiction.

Submission Window/Type: Rolling (All year), Email (No Fee). Guidelines.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

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Please comment! Let me know if any journals have incorrect information, or you feel that they don't belong on a list like this (they don't publish any experimental work, even if they claim to), or you know of any journals that would fit in that aren't on the list, you want more clarification about the experimental writing essay or you run a press and want to work with me to turn this into a full-on anthology with a bunch of editor's interviews, that personal essay I teased, and a nice section of pieces published this year—I can do it, check out the "Poems to Quarantine With: National Poetry Month in a Time of Pandemic" for a sample of my anthology selection steez. And if you want a bunch of poetry videos in your life check out the 'activity packs' I was posting daily during April—I dug up some great poetry videos, some with under 100 views. But yeah, I'm going to sleep.

This article took a ton of research, for each journal I tried to find the best mission statement, submission guideline or editor interview snippets to give as complete a view of their aesthetic as was available. If the article/list was useful to you I would truly appreciate any donations that you fine readers might send my way. I'll use every dime on my own submissions. Cub Scout's honor (and I was a Webelo!)

I utilized a great number of resources in addition to my own google-fu to make this happen, including checking (almost) every journal that nominates for the Pushcart Prize as of 2019 using the anthology. Notations for quotes are below, but these sites are great and will help you find the journals you’re looking for. Keep reading, keep creating, keep experimenting, and keep getting out there.

Duotrope

New Pages

Poets & Writers

Derek Annis’ Submission Calendar

Trish Hopkinson’s blog

Entropy Magazine

Six Questions For

(interviews with editors)

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Annotation

[1]: “What is Experimental Poetry & What Does It Mean?” by Ann Huang

[2]: City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133

[3]: And it’s all good.

[4]: This quote comes from Specimens of The Table Talk of The Late Samuel Coleridge In Two Volumes, Volume 2 from the July 3, 1833 conversation, and if you don’t want to load up the free google books link, here’s the relevant quotes in my mind, the asterisked section is a bit of relevant published writing of Coleridge presented by Coleridge’s nephew the editor of this volume and witness to the conversations, which the preface indicates his goal with the recollections “the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each particular topic into intelligible wholes with as little injury to the living manner and diction as was possible. So knowing that asterisked section is just a clarification of the first point made, and is not me, but the original publication’s note, here’s the relevant 2-part quote:

“the collocation of words is so artificial in Shakespeare and Milton that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages*...
* "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."—Quarterly Review, No. CIII. p.7.
...the definition of good prose is—proper words in their proper places;—of good Verse—the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault... but in verse you must do more;—there the words, the media, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice—yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole of the poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the media may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is quocunque modo, the effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this." 

[5]: A couple examples being: these 2 poems at Otoliths, this poem at Journal Nine, this poem in deLuge, these two erasure poems in Florida Review Online (Aquifer), this black-out poem in Kissing Dynamite, these 2 poems in Lotus-eater, this poem in Sweet, this piece of hybrid fiction at duende, this piece of hybrid fiction at Gone Lawn and these three poems in Epigraph Magazine.

[6]: A couple examples being this triolet at Third Wednesday, this poem at Roanoke Review, this poem at Westview, this poem at Green Briar Review, this poem at Straylight, this prose poem at Cortland Review this short story at Corvus Review and this short story at Apeiron Review.. I’ve got hundreds guys, just trust me I enjoy reading and writing a very wide spectrum of literature.

[7]: Map Literary “Experimental Fiction”

[8]: There are a number of worthy reads on the subject, which I consulted for this article, including Chicago Reader “Naked Censorship, Part I: The University Goes Ballistic; & Part II: The Beats Strike Back” 1995; 

[9]: This was another insightful article on the subject, from a woman named Barbara Goldowsky who was a young intern at The Chicago Review at the time of the scandal. “Beat Poets and Zen Buddhists on the Midway”; Chicago Review 

[10]: And finally, this is an informative article from Column 39 talking about the incident and the forming of Big Table all the way through the end of the obscenity court case. “Big Table” from Column 39, 1998;

[11]: From Censorship: A World Encyclopedia “EE Cummings: The Enormous Room”

[12]: From “8 Groundbreaking Experimental Novels That Are More than 100 Years Old” at Electric Lit by Maryse Meijer. 

[13]: This started as an article for my informal Journal Submission Journal, but every time I discovered another journal that is seeking innovative or ‘genre-bending’ or ‘experimental’ or a dozen other terms that appear in the venn diagram of words used to describe experimental writing, I found three more. Then I realized I’d published in a journal that is after ‘new’ writing and I’d just totally forgotten about them. I expected to find at least 30. There were a number of lists out there, but most were either outdated or only had a few. I backburnered the issue as the list added up, then as the essay—if I use that term for this loosely enough—started taking shape in an amorphous, nonlinear fashion, but as it went along, pieces clicked into place more and more. I thought I was done at 80, then at 130, again around 150, but I pushed through the whole list of Pushcart Prize nominating magazines (I’m sure I missed some, or thought some were on permanent hiatus when it was just a temporary one, or I didn’t realize that they are courting the avant-garde based on my browsing of their available material. Or another dozen reasons. There are so many journals out there. There are so many on this list—over 200 as I’m trying to finish this up and post it. I may clean up the presentation eventually but frankly, I’m exhausted. I have other projects dying to get my attention. I would love to turn this into an anthology if there are any presses out there interested, let me know. But, this aside was long enough for even Swift to stop praising it.[14]

[14]: Tub Thumpin with Jonny in 1889.

[15]: From The Brown Daily Herald article “David Shields ’78 challenges nonfiction” 3/18/10 

[16]: These folks.

[17]: From Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford.