Rougarou is the international online literary magazine run out of the graduate English Department of University of Louisiana at Lafayette. They are currently open to no fee submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art until March 18. They are also running their annual contest for poetry with a $10 submission fee until April 16. You can read past issues on their website to get a feel for the type of work they accept. For more information see my interview with Co-Editor-in-Chief Kym Cunningham and a link to submission guidelines below.

HOPKINSON: Tell me a little bit about Rougarou. 

CUNNINGHAM: Rougarou is the international online literary magazine run out of the graduate English Department of University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It is run entirely by graduate (both master’s and doctoral) students at the university and is 100% a volunteer operation. None of us get paid for this, so it is entirely a labor of love. Because it is run by graduate students, we have a relatively high turnover for the staff as well. Most people finish in our programs within a few years, which means the opinions and tastes are always—more or less—in a process of relative flux. However, it also means that we have a pretty wide network of people who have been associated with the journal, as opposed to other literary journals with a set staff that rarely changes. It’s just a different way of doing things, and I like to think the creative writing community benefits from having access to both. 

The best, and by far the most important, thing about Rougarou is the name. In Cajun folklore, the more-or-less werewolf rougarou hunts the swamps around our campus (and Louisiana more generally). The original editors wanted to pay homage to this narrative, and my current Co-Editor-in-Chief, Couri Johnson, and I are working to really lean into this as a focalizing aspect of the journal, by making, for example, submissions open and close on a full moon. It’s little things like this that bring us joy, and we’re hoping our readers and contributors feel the same. 

HOPKINSON: How/why was Rougarou originally started? 

CUNNINGHAM: Many universities have graduate-student-run literary journals, and the English department decided it was time we had one as well. It’s really a great experience, both for those of us who are in creative writing as well as the more literature or composition focused graduate students. There’s kind of a position for everyone, and we all get to work together in various ways to showcase our favorite creative writing. I like to think about Rougarou and other literary journals like it as a more grassroots response to the literary publishing world. Because it’s online and doesn’t charge submission fees (except for the yearly contest), it’s accessible to almost everyone, and we also get submissions from all over the world, although a majority of our submissions do seem to come from US writers. 

HOPKINSON: Who is your target reader audience? 

CUNNINGHAM: Really anyone who wants to read creative writing. Again, it’s all free online, so anyone has access to it, provided you have an internet connection. 

HOPKINSON: What type of work are you looking for? 

CUNNINGHAM: Because there is a fairly high turnover rate for our editorial positions, this does change, but personally, I want writing that is political. For our speculative fiction contest this past spring, our runners-up wrote two stories that will stick with me for quite some time: One, “Erascist,” made me consider what would happen if Dave Egger’s The Circle met critical race theory; and the other, “Essential Work,” made me cry reading about androids. This is what I want to see in our literary journal: writing that sucker-punches you in the gut and makes you think about the current state of the world. Also, on principle, I like anything weird. So there’s that. 

HOPKINSON: What do you wish you’d see submitted, but rarely comes in? 

CUNNINGHAM: So most magazines that I’ve worked on have always had very few creative nonfiction submissions. So if you write CNF, please submit your work to us. We don’t get a lot. Same with Visual Art. 

HOPKINSON: What are some of your favorite lit mags/journals?

CUNNINGHAM: I’m a fan of experimental work. DIAGRAM is definitely one of my favorites, just because I think the work they showcase with linguistic spatialities is fascinating. 

HOPKINSON: What is your favorite part of being on staff with Rougarou?

CUNNINGHAM: Quite frankly, it’s fun. We get to read creative writing which is all most of us want to do anyway. It’s cool to see what other people in other programs, other disciplines, other countries are writing and thinking about. And, if you’re one of the co-editors-in-chief, we get to make up arbitrary things, like suggesting that we open and close submissions on the full moon for no other reason than we find it amusing. There are a lot of things about graduate school that are infinitely frustrating, but working on a literary journal that is student-run is pretty cool. We basically get to make this what we want, an agency that we really don’t have in many other areas of our lives. 

HOPKINSON: Where can we send submissions? 

CUNNINGHAM: Please use Submittable. Please do not email us your submissions or send us your writing in FB messenger. 

HOPKINSON: If someone has a question, how can they contact you? 

CUNNINGHAM: You can feel free to email us at rougaroueditors[at]gmail.com. We will also respond to FB DMs, although we will not accept submissions through either of these mediums.

Click here to read submission guidelines.

• DEADLINE FOR REGULAR SUBMISSIONS: March 18, 2022
• SUBMISSION FEE: None
  • We open every fall and spring for submissions, usually for around a month or two. This spring, we will open from Feb 16-Mar 18, and intend to continue holding submission periods that occur on full moons. We let people know about our submissions via social media, so make sure you follow us on twitter, instagram, or wherever you consume your internet vitamins. 
• DEADLINE FOR POETRY CONTEST: April 16, 2022
• SUBMISSION FEE: $10
• PRIZES: 1st place – $500, publication, social media coverage. 2nd and 3rd place – publication and social media coverage
  • Judge: Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope, and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her recent writing appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Iowa Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. She also regularly collaborates with Fortnight Institute to write exhibition texts.
• FORMAT: online
• PAYMENT: We are unfortunately not a paying market at this time, with the exception of the yearly contest, which offers payment to the winner.
• ISSUE FREQUENCY: Bi-yearly
• AVERAGE RESPONSE TIME: Usually within three months.
• SUBMISSION METHOD: We only accept submissions via Submittable.
• SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS: Absolutely. Please submit to us and everywhere else. Just let us know if your work gets picked up before we grab it.
• FORMS: Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Visual Art
• SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• DUOTROPE: https://duotrope.com/listing/2340/rougarou-journal-of-arts-and-literature

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