The Women Who Submit blog is now CLOSED for submissions for our bi-monthly publication. Please keep an eye out for a new call for submissions, coming soon.
We are currently accepting personal essays, articles, and poetry for This Makes up the Sky: A Year of Looking Upward.
What we’re looking for:
For this year’s blog series, This Makes up the Sky: A Year of Looking Upward, we’ve created six unique themes to tell the complete story of our sky. We’re looking for work that disrupts our everyday gaze, turning the familiar upwards and outwards. Send us your poetry, flash fiction, or brief essays that explore these themes through fresh angles – whether it’s a poem about the secret language of starlings, a story that lives in the space between the sight or sound of a drop of rain or in the absence of color in weather, or an essay that maps the geography of a recurring dream. We’re particularly drawn to pieces that find unexpected entry points [or exits]. Your work might examine the physics of a cloud formation, the cloud that sat above you on one of your firsts, the folklore of weather patterns, the literal mathematics of bird flight or the sociology of shared skies. It could touch the surface or be deeply personal. Above all, we seek writing that might help us see differently, all at once — something that makes the sky feel both vast and intimate at once.
We hope these themes [prompts] might instigate some intentional reimagining that by the end of the year might allow us all to reimagine the sky as a collective space of being and becoming.
Themes to submit under:
Murmuration: The architecture of collective flight
Submissions Due by November 14
For December publication
Dreams: Always just above the surface
Submissions Due by February 28th (extended to March 7)
For March & April publication
Birds: Witnessing the mathematics of flight, of song, of movement…
Submissions Due by April 25
For July & August publication
Weather: Documenting the systems that animate unwritten rules
Submissions Due by June 27
For August & September publication
Light: The science of seeing and being seen
Submissions Due by August 23
For September publication
Clouds: Investigating shifting narratives Submissions Due by September 26
For October publication
Rain: Contemplating precipitation in all its forms
Submissions Due by October 24
For November publication
We publish on the first and third Monday of each month. Mostly.
For a glimpse of what we’ve published in the past, check out our previous blog series’: Intersect edited by Thea Pueschel, Breathe and Push edited by Noriko Nakada, Writing on a Budget edited by Lisbeth Coiman, Story Telling in Action edited by Romona Pilar Gonzales, and Closing the Gap, edited by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The WWS blog accepts original, unpublished pieces no more than 2,000 words.
- Work should be 12 Times New Roman, double spaced (single-spaced for poetry) with one-inch margins
- Email the piece as an attached .doc or .docx. If images are included, please do not send attachments (we’ll ask for them if the piece is accepted).
- Include a short cover letter in the body of the email that states how you heard of Women Who Submit, your genre, where you reside, and a short 50-word bio.
- Simultaneous submissions under more than one theme are welcome. You can submit to any themes throughout the year, as long as the deadline has not passed.
- Send to the Managing Editor, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell at blog@womenwhosubmitlit.org with the theme you are submitting under and the word “Submission” in the subject line. e.g.: “Dreams Submission”, “Rain Submission”
- Contributors whose work is accepted will receive $75 per piece, upon publication, paid exclusively through Zelle, Venmo, or PayPal. International contributors should verify their ability to receive payments through one of these platforms before submitting.
*Note: As an editor & publisher, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell disengages from writing that perpetuates violence through racist, xenophobic, classist, sexist, misogynistic, ageist, ableist, homophobic, and/or transphobic ideologies.
Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, Blog Managing Editor (she/they), is a writer, content strategist, publisher, and advocate whose work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals and three chapbooks: Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016), End of the Road (2017), and Facilitating Spaces 101: A Manual for equitable Arts Programming (2018), and has produced a ton of literary events throughout LA. She lives with her husband, seven-year-old, and their gato in Los Angeles, where she runs a small press and where she is ever-attempting to work on Happiest Place on Earth, her poetry contribution to conversations around memory, place, and belonging, inspired by a trip to Disneyland while in the foster system. www.jessicaceballos.com