Deadlines: August & September 2025
Every middle of the month: new deadlines, new contests, and new opportunities for your work to find its audience. Here is a roundup of ten submission opportunities with deadlines in August or September, including The Nashville Review, Blue Earth Review, 32 Poems, and more.
DEADLINE: 8/15
EcoTheo Review invites submissions of writing and visual art at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and culture. For the Autumn 2025 issue, we also welcome themed submissions that respond to the concrete and abstract impressions of THRESHOLD.
Theme Details
In ecological terms, a THRESHOLD can signify a critical limit, a tipping point where a system may fundamentally shift, or the dynamic boundary between distinct environments, like an ecotone. Spiritually, THRESHOLD evokes liminal spaces, moments of profound transition, or the initiation into new understandings of the sacred and our place within it. Culturally, it can represent a historical pivot, a societal breaking point, or the challenging passage into new ways of being and relating.
We invite submissions that explore these multifaceted interpretations and more, and invite contributors to consider the following: What does it mean to stand at the edge of significant change—personally, ecologically, or spiritually? How do we navigate these critical junctures, and what new possibilities or challenges emerge from crossing them?
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 8/15
South 85 Journal: THEME ISSUE: DELUGE | DROUGHT
THEME: DELUGE | DROUGHT
- Is less more? Is more too much? Can less be enough? Is more actually more? What has overwhelmed you? Underwhelmed you? When must we say, Stop? When do we beg, Keep going?
- Where do we live? An environment of too much or not enough? Or both? Can we achieve balance or is our fate locked in the extremes?
- Maximalist or minimalist…in possessions? Passions? Food? Drink? Love? Questions? Answers? Time? Flowers?
- Inundate ~ overflow ~ drown ~ shortage ~ lack ~ parched. Rebirth. Destruction.
- The possibilities are endless, and we want this theme to feel open to countless interpretations. As always, we’re eager to see what you come up with!
Poetry submissions should contain no more than 3 poems, up to 6 total pages, one poem per page.
Fiction submissions should be between 800 and 4000 words. Please include word count. Flash fiction should be under 750ish words, submitted to the flash category. One story per submission.
Nonfiction submissions should be no longer than 4000ish words. Please include the word count on your submission.
*All work will be considered for our Editor’s Choice Award of $100, which will be given to ONE piece in the issue.*
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 8/21
Every summer, Blue Earth Review hosts our Dog Daze Summer contest, looking for exemplary and exuberant flash fiction, flash creative nonfiction, and short poetry. Three $500 prizes are awarded per year to the most exciting submission in each genre. Submit up to three poems per submission in a single file (.doc or .docx). The winner will receive $500 plus publication in an upcoming issue of Blue Earth Review. We may offer publication to additional finalists.
We’re looking for ambitious and exuberant works of short fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and visual art that offer insights, complicates existing conversations, and enriches our understanding of what it means to be human in this increasingly diverse world. We gravitate towards small, focused works in which every word matters.
Poetry: Submit up to three poems per submission in a single file (.doc or .docx). Max 5 pages.
Reading fee: $5
DEADLINE: 8/31
Harvard Review: Poetry 2025
Harvard Review publishes new poetry, essays, fiction, drama, criticism, book reviews, and interviews. From its beginnings, the journal has been committed to showcasing the work of emerging writers alongside established voices, or, as we like to think of it, publishing writers who will be famous next to writers who already are.
Manuscripts must be paginated and clearly labeled with the author’s name on every page. Please limit your submission to no more than 5 poems. Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but we ask that you notify us if the work is accepted elsewhere.
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 9/1
Nashville Review seeks to publish the best work we can get our hands on, period. We hope to provide a venue for both distinguished and emerging artists.
We welcome up to three poems (10 pages total) in one document (.pdf, .doc, or .docx). Please note that we cap our submissions to ensure a reasonable response time.
Include your contact info, a brief author bio, and the title(s) of your piece(s) in your cover letter. Your manuscript document must not contain any personal or contact information.
Please submit once per reading period. There is no fee to submit and we are proud to pay our contributors: $25 per poem and $100 for prose and art pieces.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 9/1
Poetry: We look for arresting imagery, polished language, emotional impact, and lyricism without pretension.
For this general call for submissions, we are welcoming poetry from Canadian and international poets, and are especially encouraging submissions from self-identified BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) poets, whose communities are historically underrepresented.
Submit up to eight poems. Each poem must be saved as its own separate file in a .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .txt file format (please no PDFs). Use standard poetry manuscript formatting (single-spaced, easily read font sizes, page numbers if more than one page long, etc.). All work should be previously unpublished.
Reading fee: none
DEADLINE: 9/8
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action: Issue 10.25
Call for Submissions
What type of magazine is ROOM?
Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is an interdisciplinary magazine that was conceived as an agent of community building and transformation. Room’s innovative and accessible forum is an intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and culture. Bringing different perspectives to bear on the complex problems facing us, Room invites greater familiarity with psychoanalysis as an important lens for personal, cultural, and political discourse.
ROOM isn’t a research publication or an academic journal. ROOM is a unique magazine that offers a dynamic, public, analytic space designed to create and deepen connections between ourselves and our communities through writing, art, and activism. Room is a community action that cultivates meaning and new perspectives through quality work, and accessibility.
- Poetry | 1-5 Poems, Formats: Written, audio, video, and/or mixed media
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 9/9
Salt Hill is a biannual literary journal publishing outstanding new fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art by people at various stages in their literary and artistic careers. We publish new and emerging writers alongside those with long, illustrious careers in the literary arts.
We are interested in work that represents a broad spectrum of experience. We believe it is critical to lift up the voices of writers and artists who have been traditionally underrepresented in the literary arts. As such, we feel an urgency to read and consider work by people of color, women, queer people, non-binary folks, and anyone else who has been marginalized by the institutions which have, for so long, dominated the publishing scene.
We are interested in a wide range of poetry, from traditional to experimental. Please send no more than 5 poems at a time. We only print previously unpublished work. We ask that all poems be submitted in one document.
We allow simultaneous submissions, but please notify us if a poem is no longer available by adding a note to your submission through Submittable.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 9/30
We are currently accepting submissions for our A FORMAL FEELING issue.
**We have a limited number of free submission slots**
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” Emily Dickinson noted. Writers have long employed formal constraint to contain intense emotion. Sometimes, the feeling itself is formal, static, stiff, ceremonious. Time collapses and “the Feet, mechanical, go round” until we can let go.
For this issue, send us formal experimentation and traditional forms; send your work of letting go and your work in the wake of great pain; send us your mechanical feet and your compressed time; the intensity that can barely be articulated and the cavities carved out by the heat of the moment after they’ve hardened and cooled.
Submit up to 5 poems , not exceeding 7 pages, in a single Word file. Each poem should begin on a separate page. Please include your name and contact information on each page. Please include a brief (75-100 word) author bio. We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Reading fee: free before August 15th, then $3 until September 30th
DEADLINE: 9/30
32 Poems: Poetry
32 Poems welcomes unsolicited poetry from February 1st to April 30th (2/1 – 4/30) and from August 1st to September 30th (8/1 – 9/30). We respond quickly (often within a few weeks) and poets who have not received a response within 90 days are encouraged to query regarding their manuscript’s status.
As a rule, we publish shorter poems that fit on a single page, but we sometimes make exceptions to accommodate remarkable work that runs a little longer. Please send no more than 5 poems (in a single document, if submitting online) and no more than one active submission at a time. We do not accept translations or work that has been previously published in print or online.
We believe poets should be paid for their work (and wish we could pay more). Contributors receive $25 per poem and two copies of the issue in which their writing appears.
Reading fee: $3