General Submissions (PRINT): Rules and Guidelines

The editors of BWR read Poetry, Prose, Comics & Art, Hybrid, and Nonfiction submissions during two periods of the year: December 1st to March 1st and June 1st to 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 feel free to email us at managingeditor.bwr@gmail.com! We’d love to chat with you.

Our annual summer contest closed for submissions on August 16th, 2024. This year’s edition of Boyfriend Village (“More Than One Boyfriend”) officially closed on May 15th, 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.

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.

Alternatively, if you donate to BWR through Submittable, you will receive a free PDF of one of our many fabulous archived issues—right now (fall of 2024), if you donate through Submittable, you’ll receive a complimentary edition of our most recent issue, 50.2—dating back to our first issue, published in 1974.

If donating or 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.

We 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.

Prose

Our 2024 Fiction Editor, Chinaecherem Obor, is looking for stories that are very aware of the worlds outside of here. Here could mean the physical space of a country or this physical plane of existence. We just want to get out of these small, contained spaces for a bit. There are many excuses to become insulated, but stories should never be a space for the insular.

So we want stories of the spirits and the magic, the international and the extraterrestrial; really we just want writers to think about other worlds and other lives and other realities and other belief systems that would be considered atypical of the traditional Western literary imagination.

We welcome stories from all sources, from writers of all races, all cultures and nationalities, all sexual orientations and gender identities, and themes that navigate these complexities.

Send a single piece of fiction up to 6000 words, or up to 2 pieces of flash, each equal to or less than 1000 words.

Poetry

Our 2024 Poetry Editor, Erika Walsh, seeks to publish poems that make us sit back and think, Wait, what even is a poem? We want poems that make the strange feel natural, and the natural feel strange. Poems that showcase underrepresented voices and contemporary issues; that dismantle conventional ways of understanding the world. We want your pop culture-obsessed poems and your folktale-inspired poems and your so-silly-it’s-serious poems. We want your poems that revel in kitsch and in play and in wonder; that recognize the subversive power of joy.

Submit up to 3 poems with a maximum of 10 pages in one document.

Please include a short cover letter and a 3rd-person bio.

Nonfiction

In today’s economy, writing creative nonfiction is risky, frisky business. At the BWR nonfiction desk this year, our 2024 Nonfiction Editor, Isabelle Joy Stephen, is seeking experimental work with high stakes, on and off the page. Out: neat/tidy braids; linear thinking; making concessions; colonial structures and forms. In: hot takes &flyaways; literary messiness; RAGE; the erotics of doom. Rip a page out of your diary. Screenshot your texts. Reconstruct receipts. Tell the truth—just tell it slant 😉

A note: we are very open to submissions of all kinds, from writers of all races, nationalities, cultures, sexual orientations, and classes; that said, we are especially welcoming of work with themes of BIPOC, queer, disabled, non-Western, and/or class struggle & liberation.

Submit 1 work of “creative nonfiction” up to [6000 words]; [or, up to 3 flash pieces < 1000 words].

Comics & Art

While our standard practice involves soliciting a single artist to be featured in each issue, our 2024 Design Editor, Ernest Ohia, encourages submissions of innovative works that blend the visual power of graphic art with the narrative depth of prose. Feel free to submit one or two graphic prose essays for our upcoming issue, and we’ll review them for potential inclusion. When submitting for this category, please kindly use .jpg, .tiff, or .pdf formats. We publish all graphic writing in grayscale.

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.