Submission Sunday 7.6.25
Virginia Quarterly Review, Sarabande, Journal Journal, New American Press, Barrelhouse, Fractured Lit, JSTOR Daily, and Massie McQuilkin & Altman
Happy Sunday, writers! Thank you for subscribing. Every other Sunday, you’ll receive eight literary submission opportunities, varying in audience and genre, that have been selected for quality and relevance.
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This edition of Submission Sunday has calls and contests from Virginia Quarterly Review, Sarabande, Journal Journal, New American Press, Barrelhouse, Fractured Lit, JSTOR Daily, and Massie McQuilkin & Altman. More details below.
Virginia Quarterly Review Open for Submissions (July 14–July 27, 2025)
Founded in 1925 at the University of Virginia, the Virginia Quarterly Review has spent nearly a century at the forefront of the American intellectual scene—first as one of the most esteemed literary journals in the country, and more recently as one of the boldest literary magazines in publishing. Fueled by editorial curiosity, and striving for deep engagement with topics both timely and timeless, VQR has become an indispensable home for thought-provoking literature, poetry, journalism, photography, and graphic arts from every section of the US and abroad.
VQR strives to publish the best writing we can find. While we have a long history of publishing accomplished and award-winning authors, we also seek and support emerging writers. A look at one of our latest issues will show you the diversity of voices we publish. For poetry, we pay $200 per poem, up to four poems; for a suite of five or more poems, we pay $1,000. For short fiction, we generally pay $1,000 and above. For other prose, such as essays and literary journalism, we generally pay $1,000 and above, at approximately 25 cents per word, depending on length.
The Sarabande Open Call for Submissions (Deadline July 31)
NOW OPEN!!✨✨ Get your work directly to our editors this July! We’re reading poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid work, and proposals for literature in translation.
Sarabande is an award-winning, internationally-distributed, nonprofit, independent literary publishing house founded in 1994 in Louisville, Kentucky. Our catalog is home to more than three-hundred works of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, and literature in translation. Our authors are Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners, Guggenheim recipients, and winners of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and many other awards, honors, and distinctions.
Each year we carefully curate a small list of works to publish with diligence and excellence. Our titles receive in-house editorial, design, publicity, and marketing services. We are committed to producing beautiful, lasting editions and to maintaining those works in print.
Journal Journal Call for Submissions
The guidelines are vague. A journal entry could be something as expected as a diary entry, or as abstracted as an accumulation of coffee cup stains on a tablecloth. It could be something that makes you consider the passage of time. It might be a list of every time you've fallen down the stairs, or an inventory of your dad's garage. Entries of all types and formats will be considered.
Examples include text-based entries, data, logs and spreadsheets, visual material, archival material, or any other formats that you might utilize to record or document something. Material that is not in the public domain and for which you are not the copyright holder requires express written permission from the copyright holder to reprint their work in Journal Journal. Found, anonymous material, such as a handwritten grocery list, will be considered on a case by case basis with consideration of privacy concerns.
2025 New American Fiction Prize (Deadline July 15)
New American Press is an independent literary publisher committed to bringing readers the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations from across the United States and around the world. We believe that books have the potential to offer readers new and compelling visions of being in the world, and we’re committed to bringing those visions to life with careful attention to each book’s design, production, and distribution.
Submissions for the 2025 New American Fiction Prize are now open. The winner will receive a contract including a $1500, publication, twenty-five copies, and promotional support. All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome, including novels, novellas, collections of stories and/or novellas, novels in verse, linked collections, as well as full-length collections of flash fiction and short-shorts. Full-length fiction manuscripts tend to be at least 100 pages. There is no maximum length.
Uncharted Spring 2025 Keynote by Benjamin Percy (July 30, 2025 at 7:00-8:30 pm EDT)
It is our pleasure and honor to introduce our submitters and followers with an opportunity to hear our keynote speaker Benjamin Percy talk about writing in multiple genres, how to keep a reader interested, and how he comes up with his inventive hooks. There will also be time for Q&A afterward! Cost: $10 (to attend and/or receive the recording).
📚 Every other week, I’ll be making space for up to three online writing classes or programs (and the occasional retreat or conference) to advertise their upcoming offerings here. Learn more about getting your own classified ad. 📚
Barrelhouse Call for Book Pitches (For What It’s Worth – Deadline August 9)
We’re a literary organization that puts out a print magazine, runs a small press, organizes the writers conference Conversations & Connections, the retreat Writer Camp, and online Write-Ins, and publishes reviews, interviews, and issues at this site. We’re glad you’re here.
We're accepting pitches for a new book series, For What It's Worth: short (25-30K words) works of creative nonfiction that have some pop-cultural "thing" at their center and combine elements of memoir and cultural criticism. Essentially, we want you to write about your pop-cultural obsession, but in a way that ultimately helps to illuminate something about your own life experience.
Fractured Lit Flash Fiction Call for Submissions (Deadline July 13)
What we love about this contest is that there are no themes or restrictions on style. We want your most innovative and resonant flash and microfictions. Send us those pieces that lift us up, that take us down, that make us feel alive. Write that story you have been obsessing over, that has you by the throat or the heart, that needs to find its readers. We love stories that reveal their characters in unique and soulful ways, that put us into the middle of the action, that make us feel something more than our usual realities. Take us through realism, fabulism, and everything in-between.
Fractured Lit publishes flash fiction with emotional resonance, with characters who come to life through their actions and responses to the world around them. We’re searching for flash that investigates the mysteries of being human, with the sorrow, and the joy, of connecting to a diverse population. The first-place winner will receive $2,000 and publication, while the fifteen finalists will receive $100 and publication. All entries will be considered for general publication.
JSTOR Daily is a daily magazine that contextualizes current and historical events with scholarship found on JSTOR, the nonprofit digital library of scholarly journals, books, images, audio, research reports, and primary sources.
We consider pitches based on material available in JSTOR’s digital library, open JSTOR Collections, and Reveal Digital. We’re excited by stories that tease out the details of a current event or historical moment or that look at the obvious in a non-obvious way. Subjects that are newsworthy, entertaining, quirky, surprising, and enlightening are right up our alley. Each of our stories is informed by, links to, and provides free access to underlying scholarship or other content on JSTOR. Because JSTOR’s digital library holds mostly archival content (rather than just-published research), our stories tend to look at the ways the present is informed by the past.
MASSIE McQUILKIN & ALTMAN Open for Queries
MASSIE McQUILKIN & ALTMAN is a full-service literary agency that focuses on bringing fiction and non-fiction of quality to the largest possible audience. We work closely with our clients at every stage of a project’s development, submission, and placement—staying involved in all issues of design, publicity and sales, long after the ink has dried on a contract, to ensure that the author’s needs are being met by their publisher.
In 2012, MMQA acquired the venerable literary agency Russell & Volkening, Inc. With its list have come the works of some of the most noted writers in the history of American publishing, including Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, George Plimpton, Barbara Tuchman, and South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. These writers and others joined MMQA’s own growing list of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction writers.
Here’s a reminder of the deadlines coming up from previous posts. Hot tips:
If you go into the archives and revisit posts from this time of year during previous years, you’ll find additional calls that are open annually.
If you submit to any of the Submission Sunday calls and publish or win, let me know and I’ll broadcast your success in a future post.
Loghaven Artist Residency (Knoxville, Tennessee – Deadline July 15)
The Novelry: The Next Big Story (Deadline July 31)
Taco Bell Quarterly Call for Submissions (Deadline July 31)
F(r)iction Call for Submissions (“Censored” and “Fame” – Deadline August 30)
American Zoetrope Screeplay Competition (Deadline September 3)
The Reed Magazine Contests (Deadline October 1)
*This newsletter does not guarantee the unimpeachable behavior of all venues shared here but the odds are good.
