Category: Poetry

Poetry

Taking Submissions: Haven Speculative 2024 General Submissions Call #2 (Early)

Submission Window: April 1st – 30th, 2024
Payment: 8 cent per word for fiction, $20 for poetry, 8 cent per word for non-fiction, $125 for cover art
Theme: Speculative fiction

It’s our goal to publish diverse voices from around the world, and to do that, we are actively seeking stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces by authors from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy canon. Our submission cycle is therefore split into two categories, where every other month is explicitly reserved for submissions by authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups. The interposing six months remain open to everyone.

As writers ourselves, we do our best to handle each submission with the care and attention it deserves. Every submission is an act of bravery, and we know that putting yourself out there as a writer can be tough. Just know that any submission we receive, unless it contains something illegal, will be kept in confidence.

When in doubt, don’t self reject! Submit submit submit!


Guidelines for Fiction

We like stories that are subtle in their telling and stick with us long after we’ve finished, and we’re more likely to buy stories that balance a sense of wonder with a bold plot and emotional depth. For our two issues focused on the climate crisis, we’re particularly interested in publishing stories from people displaced by or threatened by the climate emergency (see our themes below). For our other four issues, we’re open to a wide variety of stories across the SFF and weird spectra.

  • Pay: 8¢ per word for original fiction
  • Word limit: 6000 words
  • Language: English
  • Rights: We buy first serial print and electronic rights for publication of the story in the English language and throughout the world. We also buy non-exclusive archival rights for our website and non-exclusive anthology rights.

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Taking Submissions: Hemorrhaging Flowers: A Collection of 100% Femme Rage

Deadline: April 30th, 2024
Payment: $10 USD
Theme: Poems inspired by feminine rage. All speculative tropes are welcome

OpensMarch 1s 2024, midnight EST 

ClosesApril 30, 2024, midnight IDLW

Compensation: $10 USD

Theme: Adult speculative poetry

Submissions must be under 50 lines

OPEN to any and everyone that identifies (now or in the past) as femme in the most inclusive of definitions.

Expected release: March 2024

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Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #37

Deadline: August 1st, 2024
Payment: $10 for poetry, $25 for artwork, 1 cent per word for fiction
Theme: False Memories
Note: Reprints Welcome

NonBinary Review is currently open for submissions on the theme of FALSE MEMORIES.

False memories first came to public consciousness in the 1980s when a group of pre-schoolers at a California preschool were coached by well-meaning social workers and police investigators into “remembering” Satanic abuse that never happened. The fallout from that episode wasn’t just the persecution of an innocent family, but a nationwide mass delusion now known as “the Satanic Panic,” where authorities were warning the public about supposed widespread satanic cults committing heinous acts of abuse. Not a single one of these warnings were founded in fact, and it is now known that a large number of them were propaganda.

But false memories aren’t always bad. There is a common phenomenon wherein people hear stories of their early childhoods so often that those stories turn into “memories.” It is common in dreams to have “memories” of things that happened to the dream self, but not to the real self. Or a person might believe that they took their regular medication, brought in the garbage bins, or picked up the mail when they haven’t.

We’re looking for weird and wonderful stories of not just the memories themselves, but of their production, their repercussions, their wider meanings. We’re looking for false memories that might have changed history, that led to remarkable discoveries, that impacted lives.

We’re NOT looking stories of recovered memories. Recovered memories are memories of real events that have been suppressed because they’re traumatic, and are a widely disputed phenomenon. We would also like to avoid stories centering abuse, trauma, and violence.

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Taking Submissions: The Lost Poetry Club: The Four Humours

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: £0.015 per word.
Theme: Speculative fiction that deals with The Four Humours (Details on that below.)

A brand new audible zine centering the bizarre, the horrifying, and the what-ifs. New Episodes bi-monthly with an exciting new theme every time. Imagine attending an open mic story-telling night in the cellar of that haunted house on the hill or the canteen of a starship that traverses time and dark dimensions. What stories would you hear? Would they inspire awe or disgust? Hope in the future or existential dread?

Genres: Sci-fi, Slipstream, Weird Fiction, Near-Future, Retellings, Folk-Tales, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Speculative…

Formats: Mainly Short Stories, Poetry, Flash Fiction, Short Plays/Extracts, (but open to) Personal Stories, Dreams/Nightmares, Songs, Soundscapes, Fictional or Real Mini-Docs, Interviews, and whatever else you can dream up…

THEME 1.02: The Four Humours

When our nature is out of balance; tempers, like fevers, run high. Step into the bewitching world of the Four Humours, where ancient alchemy meets the intricate tapestry of the human psyche. Dividing our episode into four sections: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.


Does your tale weave characters with raw intensity and larger-than-life personalities?  Are they charismatic, ambitious, deep thinkers, or cool-headed under pressure?  Or,  instead, impulsive, domineering, pessimistic,  or lazy?

Think tales of disease, of body or mind, potions and magic, chaos and order, material change, and personal transformation. Treat us to characters whose flaws are their undoing, whose struggles mirror our own, and whose stories resonate with the raw intensity of big emotions and larger-than-life personalities.

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Taking Submissions: Sundog Literature 2024 Window #1

Deadline: March 1st – May 1st, 2024
Payment: $50
Theme: 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.

A Note on Our Aesthetic

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.

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Taking Submissions: Solar Punk Magazine April 2024 Window

Submission Window: April 1-14th, 2024
Payment: $.08 per word for fiction ($100 minimum), $40 per poem. $75 for for nonfiction, $100 for reprint cover art, $200 for original unpublished cover art, $50 for reprint interior art, $100 for original unpublished interior art
Theme: All forms of Solarpunk, however, this issue is open to BIPOC authors only

Solarpunk Magazine publishes hopeful short stories and poetry that strive for a utopian ideal, that are set in futures where communities are optimistically struggling to solve or adapt to climate change, to create or maintain a world in which humanity, technology, and nature coexist in harmony rather than in conflict. We also publish solarpunk art as well as nonfiction that explores real world, contemporary topics and their intersection with the solarpunk movement for a better future.
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Taking Submissions: SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series

Deadline: November 30th, 2024
Payment: 10 cents per word for fiction and $2/line for poetry. Also, a contributor’s copy
Theme: Speculative short stories and poems that either include trains or aliens as their focal point

The purpose of the SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series is to showcase provocative and powerful tales related to a single theme. Following the publication of our first theme anthology, Automobilia, in 2024, we are now seeking short stories and poems for the next two anthologies in the series. The titles are Train Tales and Aliens Among Us. Publication is set for early 2025.

As each title suggests, a train or an alien (space aliens that is) should be such an integral part of your story or poem that if removed the story or poem collapses.

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Taking Submissions: Cunning Vision: Sound and Vision

Deadline: March 20th, 2024
Payment: Does not say in this call, previous payments were: £100 per article, interview or short story and £50 for poetry and rituals
Theme: Sound and Vision
Note: Not open to fiction submissions from North America at this time

We are open to print magazine submissions.

Our next theme is Sound and Vision.

Artists have long spoken of the mysterious nature of creation – where do their great works come from? Tell us about found stories, the automatic process, of pictures and songs invoked in séances, of musicians and poets who found magic by unorthodox means, and occult-derived art. Some songs and paintings are like spells, speaking to our unconscious and activating something within us, from war cries to the songs with revolutionary spirit to the secret chords that please gods and the folk songs that invoke lives lead outside the mainstream. Tell us about subliminal messages in advertising and how the aesthetic and auricular world influence us. A pioneering artwork might predict the future, or change the course of history. It might show us a piece of the world and mind we never knew before. Sight is a privileged sense – what is it to see clearly, or to not see at all? Visual aids such as spectacles changed our ways of seeing – so too did the emergence of various -mancies and scrying mirrors that offered an alternative perspective; there is seeing with our eyes and then there is seeing with our other senses. For this issue, we draw inspiration from Hilma af Klint, David Bowie, William Burroughs, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington, WB Yeats, William Blake and a whole host of other artists, musicians and writers who had visions. We are looking for interviews with musicians and artists, personal essays, articles, rituals, poetry and short fiction that speak to sound and/or vision. Submit fiction or poetry and pitch non-fiction by 20th March 2024.

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