Submission Guidelines

Burningword Literary Journal accepts poetry, flash fiction, flash nonfiction, photography, and digital art submissions for publication. Please read through the brief guidelines and publishing schedule before you submit.

Genres and Details

Poetry in any form or style. Your poetry submission may contain up to five (5) poems, may be submitted as one file, run fewer than 10 pages in length, and must be unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are welcomed so long as you withdraw them when accepted elsewhere.
Flash fiction (a.k.a. microfiction, short-short story, sudden fiction, etc.) submissions should aim for a word-count of 300-500 words or less per piece. You may submit up to two (2) pieces per issue, may be submitted as one file, should run fewer than 5 pages in length, and must be unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are welcomed so long as you withdraw them when accepted elsewhere.
Flash nonfiction submissions should aim for a word-count of 300-500 words or less per piece. You may submit up to two (2) pieces per issue, may be submitted as one file, should run fewer than 5 pages in length, and must be unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are welcomed so long as you withdraw them when accepted elsewhere.
Photography & digital art (open call). We seek original photography or 2D digital art to include in our quarterly publication. Your submission may include up to three (3) image files each in JPG format at a resolution of 1,850 pixels on the longest side and no larger than 7MB. Due to the special nature of visual arts, you may submit previously published work and may further disseminate that work as you wish.
Please keep your email address updated in Submittable because that’s how we notify you of our editorial decisions, awards notifications, and related requests and calls. We now charge a modest submission fee to help offset the cost of maintaining the manuscript system and web-hosting. Because of this change, we now encourage multiple pieces per submission, as outlined above.

Important Guidelines

This journal uses a double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. Please remove all instances of your name from your work itself before uploading it!
Your name (or pen name), along with contact info. and third-person bio should be entered using the submission form. Those items will be published with the selected work, per the terms of use agreement. Do not include any information that you do not wish to be shared publicly!
If you need to withdraw a submission for any reason, please do so within our submission system.
If you use a pen name, be sure to use that in place of your real name, in all instances.
Your name (or pen name), along with contact info. and third-person bio will be published as is, along with your selected work.
If you need to modify a submission for any reason, including your name (or pen name), contact email, biography, etc., please do so within our submission system. Modifications to work, including byline and bio, are not possible after publication.
We accept simultaneous submissions and prefer unpublished material.

Guidelines After Publication

There is a limited ability to “proof” your chosen work before it goes into publication. Errors made by Burningword Literary Journal to either the print or electronic versions will be corrected by Burningword ASAP. Please let us know if you find an error.
We accept simultaneous submissions; however, if we accept your work for publication, it is your responsibility to immediately notify all other publications it is no longer available.
The authors and artists we publish receive a complimentary eBook issue and significantly reduced rates for print copies.

Schedule

Burningword is a quarterly web, print, and digital publication with issues published January 5, April 5, July 5, and October 5. The cut-off date for submissions is the 10th day of the prior month for each quarter:

January Issue Submissions open October 1st and close December 10th
April Issue Submissions open January 1st and close March 10th
July Issue Submissions open April 1st and close June 10th
October Issue Submissions open July 1st and close September 10th

Copyrights, Reprinting, and Attribution

Burningword Literary Journal typically asks for the right to publish an author’s work in a single print edition, an epub version of the same issue, and also in future retrospective editions of the journal. We make our entire journal available to subscribers, with the most recent issues available to all. After publication, all rights revert to our authors, and if you wish to reprint, repost, or redistribute their work in any form, it is your responsibility to contact the writer and secure permission. Please take a quick look at the Copyright Notice and our Terms of Use. Our policies were created to help protect your rights, and ours, too.