GUIDELINES

• Through August, we will be accepting submissions across genres for our annual contest! Essays, stories, poems, flash, and any other form of hybrid writing that takes risks and experiments with form & content are welcome. This year, BWR seeks to publish the strange & surreal, to complicate rather than complete or compare, to share unusual art-forms and underacknowledged experiences. BWR is named after the Black Warrior River, a name honoring Chief Tuskaloosa, a paramount chief of the Mississippi nations. Like the river, our journal is constantly changing & deeply resilient. We are the longest-running journal helmed by graduate students the United States, running continuously since 1974. While we’re based in Alabama and pride ourselves on featuring local writers and artists alongside Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, we have serious national reach and are often considered on the forefront of experimental, fabulist, and all-around “weird” literature and a home for marginalized voices. We believe in pushing boundaries, fostering innovation, and amplifying voices often unheard in traditional literary spaces.

  We strongly recommend checking out a past issue of Black Warrior Review before submitting to our contests to get an idea of our general aesthetic. You can order a copy of issue 51.2 here to check out last year’s winners and our other fabulous contributors in glossy print.

  Categories Accepted

  • Short stories: 1,001 – 6,000 words.
  • Flash fiction/nonfiction: up to 1,000 words per piece (up to 2 pieces per submission).
  • Poetry: up to 5 poems per packet (no length limit re: page count). 
  • Creative Nonfiction: 1,001-6,000 words.

  Eligibility

  Students, faculty, staff, and administrators currently affiliated with the University of Alabama are ineligible for consideration or publication. Intimate friends, relatives, colleagues, and former or current students of the judges are ineligible to submit in that category. Previous winners should wait three years after their winning entry is published before entering again.

  Black Warrior Review adheres to the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics. You can read about this code here.

  Our Submission Guidelines

  Submit your work through Submittable at bwr.submittable.com/submit. We do not accept mailed submissions.

  Upload your submission as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf.

  Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: There is a $20 entry fee for both domestic and international submissions.

  Flash: There is a $10 entry fee for up to 2 pieces in any genre (fiction or nonfiction) of up to 1,000 words (respectively, not altogether).

  Please email us at blackwarriorreview@gmail.com with any questions.

  Winners and runners-up will be informed in October of 2024, and we will announce the winners & runners-up publicly in October. We accept, and encourage, simultaneous submissions and only ask that you withdraw your piece(s) using Submittable upon acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work previously published elsewhere.

  No AI Submissions

  We currently do not accept work from artificial intelligence (“AI”) generators or similar. By submitting your entry here, you are attesting that your work was not created, in whole or in part, with an AI generator or similar.