Deadlines: April & May 2026
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 April or May, including The Georgia Review, Lucky Jefferson, NDR: New Delta Review, and more.
DEADLINE: 4/19
Outskirts publishes poetry, short stories, essays, hybrid works, and visual art. We seek to amplify a wide range of voices from emerging and established artists. In fact, we’d love to be your first publication!
- Submit 3-5 poems (maximum 10 pages) in a single (Word) .docx file.
Reading Fee: free for BIPOC poets, or $3
DEADLINE: 4/22
Beaver Magazine: Spring 2026 Theme ANGER
For our next online issue themed ANGER, we want your zoom soliloquy to your therapist, a stichic of your road rage when no one’s watching, a love letter to your absent internal peace, an abecedarian denouncing the department of education, a seething sonnet with a pacifying volta. An existentially pissed-off ekphrastic based on Manifest Destiny or a photo of a polar bear on a melting ice cap. However you experience anger, or try to get over it, send it.
We want work that’s fluid and funky, connected and coiling. We love work about how we shape the land and how the land shapes us. We want poems that pull you in and don’t let go. We want a beaver dam of a piece that keeps the perfect amount of water in, poetry we can build and live in for years to come. Help us form this creative landscape with your lovely words!
- Submit 3-5 poems in the same document.
Reading Fee: free
DEADLINE: 4/23
Northern Spy is a literary journal out of Finger Lakes Community College seeking a bountiful harvest of diverse works with two themed open calls for submissions: New Beginnings & Twisted Roots
For New Beginnings: Our journal, formerly Bare Hill Review, has been renewed as Northern Spy, and so our Spring 2026 issue seeks works that celebrate new life and new beginnings. Everyone has been a part of the cycle of new beginnings. We want to hear all about these fresh starts. We desire works that celebrate transformation, but also works that reflect on what was left behind, for every sapling is the culmination of another tree’s efforts. Submit literature that embraces change. Someone leaving behind their old life. A married couple giving romance another chance. Kittens found in the woods. An unexpected opportunity. Tell us all about the move from your parent’s house, and let us help carry boxes to the U-Haul. Tell us about the ending that spurred a new chapter of your life—the new growth can’t come until the harvest ends.
For Twisted Roots: Tree roots can be deep and twisted. They writhe in the dark soil, coiling around forgotten secrets. For our Fall 2026 issue, we at Northern Spy seek to exhume them. Send us literary work about hidden twists in a person’s roots. Grandchildren discovering an unsettling relic in their late grandparents’ belongings. A strange family tradition that is suddenly called into question. Broken taboos that result in a hereditary curse.
Reading fee: free
DEADLINE: 4/30
Notre Dame Review: Poetry
Notre Dame Review is an independent, non-commercial magazine of contemporary American and international fiction, poetry, criticism and art. Our goal is to present a panoramic view of contemporary art and literature, and we are especially interested in work that takes on big issues by making the invisible seen—work that gives message form through aesthetic and linguistic experience. Excellence is our sole criteria for selection, although we are especially interested in fiction and poetry that take on big issues.
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 5/1
NDR is an online literary and arts journal produced by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. Since 1984, NDR has published the work of emerging and established writers.
We welcome poems that challenge traditional notions of lyricism… or avoid the lyric altogether. Stricter forms are fine, but we tend to prefer them corrupted. Embrace the bizarre, the political, the radical, but do so with purpose.
- Send 1-5 poems in a single document for review
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 5/3
What happens when you look closely at the strangeness of daily life? Paradox is an exploration of the everyday. It is a place where curiosities, absurdities, social tensions, and impossible what‑ifs sit side by side. It is a way of looking closely at the bizarre logic of our all‑encompassing reality and translating that attention into writing or art.
Inspired by the work of our Summer 2022 Literary Illustrators, this issue invites you to examine the contradictions that shape daily life and respond with work that questions, unsettles, delights, or reveals something true.
- Submit up to 3 pieces per upload.
Reading fee: free
DEADLINE: 5/16
Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine: Issue #3: Poetry
Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine is committed to publishing original work that represents a wide aesthetic range, from the traditional to the experimental.
We’re looking for poetry that reveals truths. Poetry that excites, challenges, grieves, and uplifts through lyric and narrative potency. We appreciate classical form and invite experimentation. This is a reassembling space, where diverse perspectives are valued and prioritized.
- Submit 3-5 poems per submission (maximum of 10 pages).
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 5/17
The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.
The Georgia Review typically publishes multiple pages of poetry by each poet we feature. For consideration:
- submit 6–10 pages of poetry or one long poem.
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 5/30
Spout Magazine sets the table for weird writers (self-identifying). Spout values a DIY-like determination to produce and share creative work; we wish to be a home for writing that demands attention.
Send us your experiments, your genre-benders, your formal disasters. We admire writing that arrives as a gut-punch, a freak accident. Letters as phenomena conjured from an extreme source. Punctuation as estranged pulp. Syntax as evidence of an untoward divine. While we seek work that disorients us, we also invite writing that’s straight-forward, that deliberately engages with convention. Since we’re committed to publishing work of different styles, we may not know if we’d like something until we see it.
- Submit 1 – 3 poems totaling no more than 10 pages in a single Word or PDF document.
Reading fee: free
DEADLINE: 5/31
Black Fox Literary Magazine: Poetry
Black Fox Literary Magazine is an international print and online publication with eclectic taste, committed to showcasing some of the best contemporary short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art. Our pages are filled with works that are fresh, innovative, emotional, and thought-provoking, selected by passionate editors who love to discover new voices and promote established ones.
We are looking for quality poetry. We don’t have many requirements for poetry, but for consideration:
- Send only 3 poems at a time in one document.
Reading fee: free