We are open now through February 1 for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art. We look forward to reading your work!
Unbound Ink nominates selected work for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and other literary honors.
General Submission Guidelines
We read each submission anonymously. Please see our Mission Statement.
Important: Do not include your name or contact information anywhere in your submission. Writers’ names are revealed only after we have formally accepted their work.
Important: Do not include your name or contact information anywhere in your submission. Writers’ names are revealed only after we have formally accepted their work.
- Please send only unpublished work. If your poem, story, or essay has been published in a journal, in a blog, or on social media, it is not eligible for publication in Unbound Ink.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please notify us as soon as possible.
- We obtain first rights to online publication only, and authors retain copyrights of their work. We ask that you wait three months before publishing the piece elsewhere, online or in print.
- Submissions are open internationally, and inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem, story, or essay is primarily written in English.
- Currently, we only accept translations by the original author.
- AI-generated work will be automatically declined.
- While we don’t charge a submission fee, we are (at this time) unable to pay our authors.
Genre-Specific Guidelines
We consider previously unpublished:
Fiction
- Submit one short story, up to 7,000 words.
- Submit one or two flash fiction pieces, up to 1,000 words each, in a single document.
Poetry
- Submit three to five poems, up to ten pages in a single document.
Nonfiction
- Submit one creative nonfiction piece, up to 7,000 words.
Visual art
- Submit up to three pieces of visual art. Visual art specs generally require a high-resolution digital format (like JPEG or PNG) sized at 1800 pixels or wider.