General Submissions (PRINT): Rules and Guidelines

The editors of BWR read Poetry, Prose, Comics & Art, Nonfiction, and Experimental Forms submissions during two periods of the year, predominantly in the winter (December 1st-March 1st) and summer (June 1st-October 1st).

These dates are liable to change, as our staff turns over annually, and the new masthead might amend the general submissions period to be either longer, shorter, or at a different point of the year. If you ever have a question about when our general submissions period is, when we’ll next be reading submissions, when they close or open, etc, please check out our FAQ page.

Our annual summer contest closed for submissions on August 16th, 2024. This year’s edition of Boyfriend Village (“More Than One Boyfriend”) was published on September 30th, 2024.

Boyfriend Village will open again in April of 2025, and our next annual contest will take place in Summer 2025.

Submissions are only accepted through our online submission manager, which can be found at bwr.submittable.com/submit. We also offer fee waivers for writers whom the submission fee would present financial hardship, and we offer free submissions for incarcerated writers. Email feewaiver.bwr@gmail.com to request a fee waiver.

Our staff is comprised of six graduate students at the University of Alabama. For our general submissions, the average response time for submissions is between 3-6 months, but it might take us a little longer to get back to you. If you have not received a response after 6 months, and there have been no updates made to your submission in Submittable, please feel free to reach out & ask about the status of your submission! If you encounter any problems, if you haven’t heard back about a submission and you would like an update, or if you have any submissions-related inquiries in general, you can email us at managingeditor.bwr@gmail.com.

We do not consider previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, if noted, and please notify us immediately if the work is accepted somewhere else. Please do not mix genres in the same submission (this doesn’t apply to our monthly themed contests or to BFV submissions).

We encourage you to read Black Warrior Review before submitting. Recent issues (50.1, 50.2, and more!) are available for $15; one-year subscriptions for $25.

If purchasing an issue through our online store isn’t feasible, check out our online edition, Boyfriend Village! Every issue of Boyfriend Village is available to read for free through our website. You can find our BFV archive by clicking on the tab that reads “Boyfriend Village” at the top of this page. Our most recent issue was “More Than One Boyfriend,” created by our first-ever team of online editors, Darby Power and Jaric Sarmiento.

This year, Black Warrior Review is thrilled to introduce a new submissions category: Experimental Forms.

In alignment with our mission to champion bold and boundary-pushing work, this genre invites pieces that defy traditional structures and explore the possibilities of hybrid and innovative storytelling. Our 2025 Nonfiction Editor, Abi Diaz, will be curating this exciting category, and you can read their call for submissions further down on this page. We’re excited to see what you create and can’t wait to feature these trailblazing works in future issues of BWR!

Prose

Our 2025 Fiction Editor, Conrad Loyer, is looking for works of fiction possessed of strong vision, vivid imagination, and relentless curiosity. We want stories that seduce, transform, and implicate us. We accept pieces of up to 6,000 words, but please keep in mind we are a print journal with limited physical space.

We seek pieces that transgress borders, disturb hierarchies, and unsettle power—stories invested in the experiences of the marginalized and the resistance of imperial binaries. Such work can lead us to dark places, but this is not a venue for torture/misery porn. We seek pieces with broader ambitions.

BWR welcomes the speculative, the uncanny, and the strange. Send us your monsters; get under our skin.

Poetry

For our 2025 Poetry Editor, Alayna Powell, poems are political.

Poems are power. Poems are people.

We seek to publish poems that encompass this tangibility: poems that deconstruct whiteness and reconstruct history; poems that hold space for chronic illness and disability; that create discomfort and break down colonial belief systems.

We want poems that protest, in form and content. We want poems that resist tradition and policy. We want poems that reimagine and rebuild.

So, send us your rule-breakers. We welcome erasures, persona, docupoetics, and other experimental forms. Submit up to 10 pages.

Nonfiction

Our 2025 Nonfiction Editor, Abi Diaz, wants your obscene, the writing that weirds language, that defies norms, and the communities of love that break down systems of oppression. We want work that transcends individualism and uplifts social change. We want to learn how you keep yourself and your beloveds rooted to the Earth. Nuance your experiences, interrogate what you take for granted, and call yourself out. We accept work from all people but are especially interested in writing that celebrates the joy of the global majority, that grounds itself to land and ecology, and examines our shared humanity.

While we would love to publish your longer pieces, we have limited space, so keep your submissions to a maximum of five thousand words.

Comics & Art

BWR typically features a single artist per issue, but for 52.1, our 2025 Design Editor, Ernest Ohia, invites you to submit your work for a fresh, experimental approach. You can send up to four one-page artworks for consideration or a multi-page piece (the latter will be presented via QR code in the issue). We’re looking for innovative works that merge the narrative depth of storytelling with the visual impact of graphic art. Please, for this category, submit your work in .jpg, .tiff, or .pdf format.

Experimental Forms

We want your work that doesn’t fit neatly into a single box. Your speculative essays, your visual lyrics, your stories that no longer resemble stories. Genre is only as useful as it facilitates a draft, so who cares what you call it. We want your unusual, uncanny valley, experimental, no-longer-a-piece-of-writing kind of work. We want pieces that breaks down conventions of writing while also breaking down conventions of society. We want your work that unlearns rules and teaches us liberation.

Due to our editorial format, not every piece will fit. Please feel free to submit up to ten pages.

Payment

Black Warrior Review is a paying market. The amount per contributor or piece is dependent on our overall number of contributors for a given issue, and the budget allocated to us by our presiding office at the University of Alabama, the Office of Student Media. These numbers are subject to change per issue and differ for contributors to Boyfriend Village (our online edition), as well as chapbook and featured-art contributors. We always pay our contributors. As mentioned at the top of the page, we also offer an optional fee waiver for anyone who needs it, which can be requested whenever we are open for submissions by emailing us at feewaiver.bwr@gmail.com.