Submissions

Hi! Thank you for your interest in Atlas and Alice. We are eager to read your work. Please read the guidelines carefully before you submit. We are looking for work that intersects boundaries and blurs genres (art meets science, prose meets poetry, positive meets negative, you get the gist).

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Rights: Atlas and Alice acquires first serial rights, but those rights revert back to you, the artist, upon publication. We kindly ask for acknowledgment for subsequent reprints of your work.

Payment: Atlas and Alice does not offer payment to contributors. Because we keep submissions free and do not run ads on our site, we do not bring in any money (like most journals, A+A is a labor of love). Occasionally, we receive money from donors to use for small honorariums, and if so, we will make note of this change in our call for submissions.

General Guidelines: Send us your work using our Submittable manager. We don’t accept previously published work, but we do accept simultaneous submissions. In fact, we encourage them. We understand it’s a writer-eat-writer world out there. Just be sure to notify us via Submittable message/note if your work is accepted elsewhere. Given the chance, we’ll mix a tasty cocktail in your honor.

Cover Letters: We all hate writing them, don’t we? So consider them unnecessary. If you have something interesting to say, want to mention a piece we published that you like, or how you found out about the magazine, by all means do. Otherwise, we simply ask that you use this space to provide us with a brief bio, as well as an email address where we can reach you.

Multiple Submissions: Please hit us up in just one genre per submission period (unless we ask specifically to see more work). Send all submissions through our Submittable manager. If your work is accepted, please wait six months before submitting new work. If your work is rejected, please wait 3 months before submitting more work.
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Submissions are currently closed.

Fiction: We want to see your self-contained stories (novel excerpts only if they can stand alone) up to 4,000 words. Got something shorter? We like flash. For fiction, send us up to three pieces, each less than 750 words (in the same document). Include the total word count at the beginning of your submission, please. For partial withdrawals, contact us through Submittable message/note (all of our editors can immediately see these when reading submissions).

Creative Nonfiction: We want your nonfiction, from flash up to 3,000 words. Please only send one piece in your submission and include the total word count at the beginning of the document.

If you’ve got a quirky CNF piece, it might be right for us. Here’s what we’re hoping to see and a few things we’re overrun with and will likely pass on.

We welcome subs from underrepresented writers. This includes (QT)BIPOC folks and writers based outside North America and the UK. Two of our editors have a soft spot for lyric pieces. “More of a seismograph, less of a timeline. I like the fragmented, the segmented which unapologetically doesn’t seek to be whole,” as one of the assistant CNF editors paraphrases Sarah Fawn Montgomery. We strongly prefer content that feels grounded and specific. Evoke a particular place, a particular time. Dig deep into what makes home “home,” the origin of names, etc. Drawing from other disciplines and forms of storytelling is encouraged when it’s done intentionally and with specificity. Not sure what that means? Browse the last issue to see what we liked.

There are a few things we DO NOT WANT: 1) your Covid stories (unless you have a particular, unique experience), 2) philosophical musings, 3) boozy expat travel stories, 4) second person breakup stories. Exceeding word count or subbing extra pieces is an automatic nope.

Poetry: We want your original, unpublished work, 3-5 poems (and no more than 10 pages per submission). Try to submit poems in different styles, so we can have an idea of the kind of writer you are. Please include all poems in a single document. For partial withdrawals, contact us through Submittable message/note (all of our editors can immediately see these when reading submissions).

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