I’m so excited to announce my poem “Bodies are Secrets,” was published in Oyedrum’s Volume 4. This issue is stunning and I’m so pleased with the exquisite artwork by Lisa Marie Vlietstra paired with my poem. Make sure to follow her on Instagram at Self Love and All Colors […]
In my twenties, my biggest struggle with writing was translating my brain to the page. I knew in great detail what feeling or atmosphere I wanted to paint or evoke, but my poems generally came out either full of impenetrably abstract and densely stacked metaphors, or sentimental platitudes. […]
Never a Contest is a substack email newsletter and online promotion project to showcase poets who have not yet won a literary contest or published a full-length book or chapbook. Each monthly publication is curated by poet, writer, and musician Brandon North and features poems previously published by […]
Literary Mama is open for submissions year round. They publish literary writing about the many faces of motherhood. Since 2003, they have celebrated “the physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual processes of becoming a mother through words and images that may be so stark it hurts.” If you aren’t […]
OutWrite is a celebration of LGBTQ literature, held annually the first weekend in August in Washington, D.C. The 2021 festival will be August 6-8, 2021. This year they are running their third annual chapbook contest for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that explore some aspect of the queer experience, […]
Things we need: 1. Money Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I’ve returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary […]
BigCityLit is an online literary magazine founded over twenty years ago publishing fiction, creative non-fiction (personal essay, book reviews), and poetry. They are currently open for submissions and would love to see more prose submissions. You can check out their current issue to see what types of work […]
Tipping the Scales is a new lesbian literary and arts journal by lesbians/for lesbians. They offer print, e-book, and PDF versions of their issues published quarterly. They are currently open for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, flash fiction, photography, and art. Feminist leaning lit mags and journals are some of […]
I’ve used poetry writing prompts with my high school students for as long as I’ve been teaching poetry, describing them as a way to distract your brain so the poem that needs to get written can get written. I tell them that like cats, poems can be shy, […]
UPDATED: January 3, 2022 Why limit yourself to being published in lit mags in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K? There are many countries with English-language lit mags you can also submit your work to. For example, my poem “My Monkey Grammarian” was published in Hong Kong and […]
