Equatorial: Seeking Undergraduate Poetry

Equatorial: Seeking Undergraduate Poetry

The cover of "Equatorial" Issue One. It shows a desert landscape; there is a road to the left and a rainbow to the right.
Cover Image for Equatorial Issue One

Equatorial is a literary magazine dedicated to publishing talented undergraduate poets. Its founding editor, Benjamin Faro, is pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Queens University of Charlotte.

Issue One of Equatorial featured five outstanding students and focused on themes of exploration. Submissions for Issue Two of Equatorial will be open until November 30, 2022. Read Equatorial‘s guidelines and submit here!

Submissions Open: Dear Mother Earth

Narrative Storytelling Initiative Submissions: Dear Mother Earth

The Narrative Storytelling Initiative‘s goal is to enhance access and public engagement with narrators and narratives. They are currently looking for messages written to Mother Earth in the future, with a maximum of 100 words. These messages will be included in a special exhibition piece at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory during the last two weeks of October.

Learn more and submit your message here!

Four Palaces Publishing

Four Palaces Publishing is Open for Anthology Submissions

The Four Palaces Publishing Logo
Four Palaces Publishing

Four Palaces Publishing is currently open to submissions for their fiction anthology contest. They are searching for short stories between 2,000 and 6,000 words long. They will also accept up to three flash fiction pieces. The theme of their anthology is “Desire to Escape.” The author of the winning story will receive $1,000 and a mentorship from guest judge Ivelisse Rodriguez, whose short story collection Love War Stories was a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist.

Founded in 2021, Four Palaces’ goal is to promote and publish works by previously unpublished writers from underrepresented communities.

Frederick Tran is the executive director and publisher of Four Palaces. Emily Townsend is the managing editor, and her nonfiction piece “Consider the Honeybee” appeared in Issue 19 of Superstition Review.

Submissions close August 31, 2022! Go here to submit your story.

Superstition Review Submissions Open

Superstition Review Submissions Open

A graphic that explains Superstition Review is open to submissions from August 1 to August 31.
Superstition Review

Superstition Review is open to submissions for Issue 30! Our magazine is looking for art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Read our guidelines and submit here.

ZAUM, Creative Writing Journal

Join Sonoma State University in their submissions period for their literary magazine, ZAUMS’s, 25th issue. ZAUM is both edited and designed by students, as well as, accepts submissions from any student, whether they attend SSU or any other university. The magazine is distributed across the Bay Area and is overseen by faculty advisor, Professor, and Poet-in-Residence Gillian Conoley. “Each issue publishes over 100 pages a year of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or visual art…”

ZAUM has been publishing for over 20 years, and the magazine has received “several national student awards from the Associated Writing Programs: for editorial vision (1996), and for graphic design (1998).” Additionally, “student work from issue # 6 and # 7 were nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, a national prize open to any writer in the country.”

ZAUM is currently accepting submissions, with their priority deadline as February 20th and their final deadline as February 28th.

To learn more about ZAUM and their submissions process click here. Also, be sure to follow ZAUM on Twitter.

We can’t wait to see your work!

New Video: Tips for Submitting Work to Literary Magazines

Check out our latest YouTube video! Our Social Media Manager Roxanne Bingham took the time to sit down with Superstition Review Founding Editor Patricia Murphy and Hayden’s Ferry Review Supervising Editor Katherine Berta to give you some insider advice as the submission season begins.

Don’t miss the tips and tricks they discussed in this video, and don’t forget to submit your work to Superstition Review by August 31st for the chance to be featured in our 26th Issue!

Issue 26 Submissions Are Open!

Issue 26: Social Justice, Submissions Open August first through thirty-first 
(promotional image)

Superstition Review is currently accepting submissions of art, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through August 31st. Submissions are free of charge on our Submittable page: https://superstitionreview.submittable.com/submit

We are proud to announce that the theme of Issue 26, our inaugural themed issue, is Social Justice. On behalf of Arizona State University and the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, we have chosen to dedicate this issue to work that promotes inclusion and explores new ways to dismantle racial and social inequality. We believe in the importance of magnifying voices that have been traditionally undermined by our histories, institutions, policies, laws, and habits of daily life.

We hear you and are here for you on your journey to inspire change through art.

What Is Social Justice?

Social Justice is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.” It is a movement for change to improve the lives of individuals who are not treated fairly or justly in our society. It is a choice to stand as a community in support of what we believe in.

We believe that everyone deserves an equal chance, regardless of their race, gender, sexuality, religion and any other part of who they are.

To read more about our commitment to structural change, read our college’s Response to Structural Racism and Violence.  

Guest Post, Fiction Editor Lucas Selby

Being isolated in our homes gives us writers that sweet time we always crave to actually get some writing done. Personally, I’ve been reading through my old work, sprucing it up and sending it in to some of my favorite magazines. I might as well while I have the time, right?

One of the most helpful parts of being the Fiction Editor for Superstition Review this year has been learning what editors look for in writing. And since it’s been helpful for me, I thought it might be helpful for you! Here’s an insider’s look on the selection process here at Superstition Review.

The first thing I did as Fiction Editor was make a mistake. I linked my editor’s account on Submittable to my personal submissions account. That means, every time I opened Submittable to review submissions, the first thing I saw was all of my rejections for stories I’ve submitted over the years. For the first hundred stories, I felt like I owed it to every author to at least read their story all the way through, because that’s what I want for all of my stories. Soon enough, I was weeks behind on deadlines and extremely tired of reading every page of the stories that I didn’t enjoy. Thus, I learned my first lesson.

Lesson 1: It’s the first page or two that makes or breaks a story. If I’m bored early on, I will not read the rest. Make that first page captivating enough to make me read the second page, then make that page captivating enough to make me read the rest of the story. Otherwise, I do not have the time.

I started catching up, but I was still behind. Submissions poured in faster than I could read them. Our Founding Editor called me and gave me some new helpful advice. We are a magazine that does not read blind. That means we read your bio and cover letter before we read your story. Trust me, the bio and cover letter are more important than you may think.

Lesson 2: Don’t waste your editor’s time with your bio and cover letter. By all means, include a bio and cover letter, but this is a brief blurb about who you are, your degree if applicable, any major awards you’ve earned for your writing, and maybe where else you’re published. This is not your resume, your life story, or a list of your Boy Scout merit badges.

Finally, I had all my favorite stories picked out. I met with our Founding Editor and the Senior Fiction Editor, and we compared notes. Unsurprisingly, all three of us have different tastes in fiction, but none of us caved to the others. We fought for the fiction we liked, and, in the end, we all left happy. This lesson is a stretch, but bare with me.

Lesson 3: Your story doesn’t have to be universal. I feel I have to address this because lots of literature is praised for being universal. There are plenty of good niche stories out there, and they are all the better because they aren’t forced to appeal to everyone. We all fought for the stories we felt the strongest about, and we all had our absolute favorites published.

I’m really proud of the upcoming fiction section in Superstition Review. The authors who wrote the stories we’re publishing should be proud as well. The authors of the stories that didn’t make the cut but were counted among our favorites should be proud. Everyone who submitted should be proud that they put their work out there.

Lesson 4: Keep writing, keep submitting, keep aiming for publication in your favorite magazines. Every time I logged on to Submittable to review new fiction submissions, I saw all of my rejections from over the years. Honestly, I was proud of them. That’s how many times I’ve put myself out there with stories I was proud of.

Keep up the good work! And thanks for a fantastic submission season.

Guest Post, Diane Payne: From Migration to Hibernation

Back in the dial-up day, before there were so many online literary magazines and publishing resources, I used to scroll through the Call for Submissions in the print version of Poet and Writers, looking for anthology themes as a means to find inspiration to start writing about something, anything.  Now the calls for submissions flood my Facebook and Twitter feed, entangled between the endless calls to sign petitions, dogs howling at TV videos, and the tiresome parenting memes. The expediency of posts is overwhelming. At night, my dreams are filled with so many imaginary Instagram and Snapchat images, I feel unmotivated and unable to write notes in my dream journal.

This past week, on a day when I thought things couldn’t become even more bleak at work, they did.  Then a call for submission flashed by with the theme:  A World in Pain. Seemed like a twisted moment of fate.

But I did not want to address this theme about our World in Pain since that has seemed to be our country’s mantra since the last presidential election. The dogs and I took the easy way out and we left for a walk.

When I returned from the walk, for some stubborn reason I decided to tackle this unpleasant theme, but not in my usual creative nonfiction form, but as a migrating bird flying from Canada to Mexico, flying over those borders with relative ease, free of the Facebook and Twitter feeds, the endless news on TV and radio. At times, the effects of climate change made the journey more difficult, and the bird learned to be on the lookout for the elderly, who have already endured a life time of personal tragedy, leaving them less grief-stricken and immobilized, and more enthusiastic about the arrival of the birds.

Then the short story ended and I felt a little better about life.

Until I submitted the story and discovered that the  magazine had closed their fiction submissions early, perhaps even at the very moment I tried to send the story, because just the day before, I could have submitted the story, had I not decided to sleep on it first. Perhaps this was their own personal twist to their theme of pain.

And then, just like that, another call for submission emerged with a climate change theme, and that bird flew off for another migration while my submission now enters a form of hibernation.

Iron City Magazine Open for Submissions

Iron City Magazine LogoWe are happy to share news that Iron City Magazine is currently accepting submissions for their third issue.

Iron City Magazine is, as put by Jessica Fletcher — former Superstition Review Intern and Iron City Magazine’s fiction editor — a “journal devoted entirely to writing and art from the prison world.” The journal publishes these works to help show that prisoners are not solely defined by their crimes, but are human also.  Submissions are limited to current and former inmates, prison volunteers, and staff.

The submission deadline is April 15th, 2018.

Iron City Magazine can also be supported through donation here.

For greater detail about Iron City Magazine’s mission and submission guidelines visit the Iron City Magazine’s website.