Deadlines: December 2025 & January 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 December or January, including Muzzle Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and more.
DEADLINE: 12/16
For this call, we are looking for your best poems about the exploration of space, whether that exploration is external or internal, astronomical or figurative. Inspired by the 2026 Artemis flight, we are looking for poems that capture the spirit of exploration and take us somewhere beyond and (possibly) bigger than ourselves. Send us poems about ships and probes sent into interstellar space, humans discovering new planetary bodies, or our understanding of how space and time intersect. Send us poems exploring the spaces we inhabit, the innovation of the human mind, how we reach outside of ourselves to discover something bigger.
Each submission should be no more than four (4) poems. Poems that do not align with the theme will not be considered for this call.
Reading Fee: no fee
DEADLINE: 12/29
The Letter Review: Prize for Poetry
The Letter Review is an internationally celebrated literary journal that believes in poetry, in literature, and in the importance and magic of new writing. In line with our commitment to pay writers professional rates, The Letter Review Prize awards writers over $16,000 USD annually, meaning it is among the highest paying literary prizes administered by a literary journal in the world. Via our prizes we seek the best new writing, while striving to help writers to showcase new work, gain the recognition they deserve, advance their writing careers, and reach a wide audience.
- The top 2-4 winning entries of the Prize for Poetry are declared the Winners, and share equally in the prize pool of $1000 USD.
- Winning entries are published by The Letter Review online, and in our Winners Anthology, with an attractive, bespoke, newly commissioned artwork.
- We are seeking poems up to 70 lines.
- The Prize is open to anyone, from anywhere in the world.
- There are no style or subject restrictions: All poems welcome.
Reading Fee: $15
DEADLINE: 12/31
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.” – William Blake
The world can’t be fit into neatly defined boxes. This year, FOLIO is seeking poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and visual art about in-betweens. Maybe you’re no longer one thing, but you aren’t quite another yet. Maybe you’ve got a rock jutting against your back, and a hard place weighting down on your front. Maybe you don’t know where you are — you just know where you were, where you should be. Maybe you don’t even know that.
If your work is about in-betweens, transitions, or liminality, we want to see it. Send us poetry that feeds on uncertainty. Send us essays and memoirs about things impossible to define. Our fiction section is open to all literary fiction writers, including writers of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. To see examples of our previously published work, visit folioliteraryjournal.com.
Reading fee: $2
DEADLINE: 1/1
Hayden’s Ferry Review: Poetry General Submissions
Founded in 1986, Hayden’s Ferry Review is a semi-annual, international literary journal edited by the MFA students at Arizona State University under the guidance of a full-time editor in chief. HFR is located in Tempe, AZ, on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities. We publish poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, and art. A small portion of the publication is solicited from established authors, while the majority of our contributors are chosen from the thousands of manuscripts the journal receives each year.
- Submit a maximum of 3 poems totaling up to 8 pages.
- Please include your entire submission in one file.
Reading Fee: $3
DEADLINE: 1/1
CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women+, is known for discovering important writers, such as Julia Alvarez, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paula Gunn Allen, Olga Broumas, Natalie Goldberg, Barbara Kingsolver, and Sharon Olds, among the more than 4,000 writers published during our first 40 years. CALYX was the first to publish the artwork of Frida Kahlo in color in the U.S. In 1980 CALYX also featured work by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska–the first English translations of her work published in the U.S. Submissions are restricted to women and nonbinary writers (see our website or general guidelines for more information about CALYX‘s mission).
- Poetry submissions are limited to 6 poems.
- When submitting, please put all poems into the same document.
Reading Fee: free
DEADLINE: 1/1
For 50 years, EVENT has published the very best in contemporary new poetry and prose. We are one of Western Canada’s longest-running literary magazines, and welcome submissions written in English from around the world. Each issue of EVENT includes high quality fiction, poetry, non-fiction and book reviews, and we feature emerging and established writers side-by-side in our pages.
For this general call for poetry submissions, we are particularly seeking submissions from self-identified BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) poets, whose communities are historically underrepresented.
Submit up to eight poems.
Reading fee: free
DEADLINE: 1/2
Hawaii Pacific Review: General Submissions
Hawai`i Pacific Review is the online literary magazine of Hawai`i Pacific University. It features poetry and prose by authors from Hawai`i, the mainland, and around the world. HPR was started as a print annual in 1987. In 2013, it began to publish exclusively online. Our pieces have been featured in the Best of the Net Anthology, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the Best American series. HPR publishes work on a rolling basis. Poems, stories, and essays are posted one piece at a time, several times a month.
- Submit each poem as a separate submission
- No more than 3 poems at a time (Submit each poem as separate submissions)
Reading Fee: free
DEADLINE: 1/15
For the past decade, Muzzle Magazine has published writing of revolution and revelation, and in 2020, on the precipice of a new decade, we will continue seeking submissions that move us not just in feeling, but also in intention. We resist the notion that a journal must have a fixed aesthetic, or that submissions for a new issue should mimic the style or approach of poems in previous issues. Instead, we are looking for poems that move (us) beyond.
Upload a file with 3-5 poems, without your name or any identifying information, and with a brief content warning on the first page (“CW:_______”) if your submission contains sensitive material.
Reading Fee: free
DEADLINE: 1/16
The Arkansas International is now open for submissions for themed issue #20, due out in the fall of 2026. This issue will be both online and in print.
Send us your stories, poems, comics, and non-fiction about all the ways we labor, whether emotional, physical, or mental. How does labor form and inform our lives? What does our work say about what we love, or about what or whom we care for? What does it reveal about what we hate or fear? Hired labor, hard labor, labors of love, or laborious revenge, all of it creative fodder.
- Prose submissions should be no more than 8,000 words, poem packets no more than five poems, and we ask that excerpts from longer works be self-contained. Please submit all work in one document.
Reading fee: $4
DEADLINE: 1/31
Quibble Lit: Poetry on People
Quibble is an online & print literary magazine for prose, poetry, and art.
This volume’s theme is PEOPLE—a word stretching across countless stories, identities, communities, contradictions, and constellations of connection. We invite you to explore it broadly or intimately: portraits, crowds, strangers, ancestors, avatars, alter-egos, lovers, enemies, neighbors, selves.
Submit up to 3 poems.
Reading fee: free