Submit to The Lit 2023
Submissions for the 2023 edition of The Lit are closed. We will open our submissions forms for the 2023 edition in Spring II (July).
General guidelines: The Lit is open to current students and alums at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY).
The Lit publishes an issue once a year, during the spring semester.
Submissions open in the Spring II (July) semester and close in Fall II (February) each year. Writers and artists will be notified about the status of their submission in the Spring I semester immediately following, and published in the online journal that term.
You may only submit to one genre. We only consider previously unpublished materials (this includes blogs, personal websites, other publications, social media — you get the drift). See the particulars for what we’re looking for in each genre and submit below, via GoogleForms. If your work has already been published in The Lit, please wait a year from your last publication to submit again. Contact us at submissions.thelit@gmail.com with any questions.
The Lit asks for first-time electronic publication rights, and we ask that you acknowledge a piece was published here first if your work is re-printed/published elsewhere; by submitting to us you are agreeing to these terms.
What we’re looking for
Flash Fiction -1 piece, 1,000 words max.
Flash Creative Nonfiction – 1 piece, 1,000 words max.
Both flash fiction & flash creative nonfiction pieces should be complete stories/narratives that can stand on their own — no excerpts from longer stories, novels, nonfiction narratives, or memoirs, please, unless you’ve somehow re-shaped them to work as solo pieces.
Poetry – up to 3 poems max, 5 pages total max. We’re also open to hybrid forms that incorporate art and/or digital media, and experimental work.
Visual or Digital Art – photo, design, painting, drawing, graphic narratives – 2 works max
What we’re not into
Bigotry of any kind. We don’t dig racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, graphic violence or sex (the kind that’s only done for shock value), or xenophobia.
Representation matters. Think about whose story you are trying to tell, and if you are the best one to tell it. Think about whose voices have been marginalized. Consider if you are trying to tell a story, or write a character, that another creator — whose own voice has been marginalized — could tell or know better.
Wait — I’m not familiar with flash. Help!
Start with us! From our 2020 edition, Carolyn Merino’s winning piece “The Golden Cage” is flash fiction. All the nonfiction and fiction in our 2021 edition is flash.
For additional flash fiction, we recommend checking out SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Matchbook, Milk Candy Review, wigleaf, MoonPark Review, and Pidgeonholes — for starters. For flash nonfiction, head on over to Brevity. Some of the magazines listed above also do flash nonfiction (SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish, and Pidgeonholes for example), and Brevity has a more comprehensive listing of flash nonfiction sources to get you started.
