Deadline: October 1st, 2022
Payment: $100
Theme: Literary fiction, personal essays, or Well-written genre-writing, especially mysteries, sci-fi and westerns.

Submission Guidelines:

We are happy to publish work that celebrates the joy of reading and writing across different reading preferences. The marketplace can divide us based on our reading tastes, but riddlebird can strive to make a space for more diversity (of interest, of authorship, of meaning).

 Please carefully read what we are looking for below, and follow the submission guidelines.

We are interested in three categories.

• Literary Fiction — Our favorite writers include authors like George Saunders, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and E.C. Osondu.

• Personal Essays — We like a memoirist’s essay that has achieved some distance and allows us to share a newfound insight. Think of Vivian Gornick’s idea of “the situation and the story.”

• Literary Genre Fiction — Our mission is to include a place for well-written genre-writing, especially mysteries, sci-fi and westerns. To take westerns as an example, think of Charles Portis.

Riddlebird is not interested in publishing work that is demeaning. Racist, homophobic, or xenophobic prose will be promptly rejected.

We will publish 6 pieces online twice a year (Jan and July) and compensate authors $100.

We publish a hardcopy of all pieces once a year. We will select 6 pieces a year to submit on your behalf to the Pushcart Prize.

We do accept simultaneous submissions; please inform us if (happily!) your work is accepted somewhere else.

Information will be posted shortly to submit on Duotrope.

• Please include your name, including contact information, and your title.

• Include a very brief cover letter in the body of the e-mail. Include a short bio in third person, and do not send previously published work.

Our goal is to celebrate your work. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram @riddlebirdmag. We will share author bios and links to your work upon publication. We request North American Serial Rights which then revert to you.

Submissions now open September 1 to October 1. Please note, due to the overwhelming number of submissions we are using the Duotrope platform.

Please visit our Duotrope site to submit your work.

If Duotrope is an impossible platform for you to use (it is free to sign register) please email your work in pdf, .docx, or .doc to [email protected].

Subject line: submission without Duotrope

Via: riddlebird.