General Submissions: Guidelines

The editors of BWR read Poetry, Prose, Comics & Art, Nonfiction, and Hybrid submissions during two periods of the year, predominantly in the winter (December 15th-March 1st) and summer (June 1st-September 30th).

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.

This year’s iteration of Boyfriend Village (“Temporal Boyfriend“) was edited by our 2025 Online Editor and 2026 Fiction Editor, Michael Wesner. It was published on September 15th, 2025 and is available for free.

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 (51.2, 52.1, and more!) are available for $15; one-year subscriptions for $25.

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Black Warrior Review is thrilled to continue accepting hybrid submissions. 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 2026 Nonfiction and Art & Comic Editors, Kt Amrine and Darby Power, 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!

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Fiction

BWR wants your stories about the other. Give us your otherized, your ostracized, your characters demarcated by exclusion. Defamiliarize our routine. Show us your aliens and your alienated, your tales of non-conformity, your dispatches from beyond the confines of both time and space. We want your overlooked perspectives, told from the brinks of belonging. We will accept stories of up to 6,000 words, but please keep in mind we are a print journal with limited physical space.

While this call seeks submissions that confront this theme on the levels of plot or character, we emphatically encourage submissions from authors who themselves have been otherized. Whether through intentional marginalization or exclusionary tastes in genre or form, literary institutions have always amplified certain voices over others, and BWR is committed to publishing authors, stories, and forms not traditionally represented in literary circles.

Poetry

We believe poetry is spiritual. We believe poetry is history. It evokes the emotional and physical spaces we have traveled before, and the possibilities of the future and the pangs in the present. Poetry is the history of words; poetry reminds us how much has happened and how much has changed.

We are interested in poems that explore the history of things and place, poems that interrogate the personal and how the colonial and postcolonial histories are embedded in the body, the tongue, the tree, the cushion, the roof, and the land and by history, what has changed through this history and what is their influence in the present.

The lands in Congo, Palestine, Sudan, the hibakujumoku trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing, the lands in Delta State, Nigeria, The lovers of Modena, and language itself. What has changed and what has remained without change?

We are interested in poems that explore personal history, poems that explore dysfunction through the little things, poems that explore BIPOC spaces. That old chair in your mother’s room, the crack on the mug, and the dust on the note.

We are interested in experimental poems that dissect the normal, poems that explore illness, memory loss and ordinary life.

For BWR, don’t self-reject, send it our way!

Nonfiction

Nonfiction can, and should be, uncertain of itself. We should be wary of anything that claims it knows the truth, the whole truth, the capital T “Truth.”

We want alternate versions of the story. The one you believe, the one that’s true, the one you want to be true. How your beloved’s tell the story differently—or how they would tell it differently. We want your speculation, your “maybe”s, your “absolutely”s, your “never”s, and we want them all with a grain of salt. We want to know where your memory fails, where you believe it’s unequivocally correct, where you have room for multiple realities. Most importantly, we want to know why you believe what you believe, why you don’t want to, why you can’t.

We want to know the truths and lies you tell yourself and the ones the world has told you. Western science, medicine, and history have used their versions of the capital T “Truth” to control and silence people for centuries. We want work that examines how these lies came to be, how they continue to scapegoat and divide us. In a world where marginalized histories are erased from textbooks and unfounded science is promoted by our government to further disenfranchise and erase us, confront these lies and tell us the truth. Call them out.

Bring us your messy truths, your unabashed lies, your I-don’t-know’s, and everything in between. Make us question reality. While we would love to publish your longer work, we only have so much space in our journal, so please limit your submissions to 4000 words.

Comics & Art

We seek art, comics, and visual narratives of all forms that are as engaged as they are engaging. We want your work that refuses to look away from the moment we are publishing into right now, work that witnesses, that reconfigures, that radically reimagines what is and what might be. We accept submissions of single or multiple works that all together total no more than six pages, though due to our print format space is limited, and we are only able to print in greyscale at this time. We also encourage submissions of work that is multidimensional and/or not primarily page-based—textiles, collages, sculptures, blueprints, installations, and more are all actively encouraged, and we are happy to accept photographed submissions as needed. If it can exist on the space of the page in any form, feel free to send it (or to email design.bwr@gmail.com if you have questions!)

Hybrid

BWR seeks work that explodes, refuses, and deconstructs the boundaries of genre altogether.

We want work interested in what becomes possible when we dissolve the conventions and constraints of genre in favor of work informed by a multitude of disciplines, practices, and knowledges. Work that utilizes hybridity to engage with how genre itself is frequently both a product and a tool of capital-colonial powers and institutions, work that moves between and across and beyond genre as an active act of resistance and refusal.

In particular, we encourage work in conversation with writing/arts practices that have long been defying and working outside of singular genre categories—artmaking traditions and histories that are frequently delegitimized and dismissed by Western literary canon constructions of genre.

Send us your work that is genre-interdisciplinary, genre-multimodal, genre-expansive, genre-denying, genre-exploding, genre-transcendent, genre-undoing. If you’ve ever squinted at a piece and thought, where do I even send this, what genre even is this? Send it here!

We accept submissions of up to 10 pages, though please note that due to our print format, space is limited. In addition, at this time we are only able to publish hybrid pieces in black and white.

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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.

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