New Madrid Calls for submissions
Submissions will be accepted between August 15 and October 15.
Please note: we accept online submissions only. All submissions must be sent via Submission Manager. Please see below for our guidelines. And as always, we advise that you familiarize yourself with New Madrid before submitting your work.
General Submission Guidelines
New Madrid is published twice per year, during the July and January residencies of Murray State University’s low-residency MFA Program. The editors invite previously unpublished submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Please submit manuscripts only during our open Submission Periods (see below). Any submissions sent outside those periods won’t be read.
See Upcoming Themes for information about what we’re seeking for developing issues.
• The attachment should end with “.doc” in the file name. (Important: Please do not submit files with the .docx extension).
• The author’s name and contact information should appear on the first page of the submission, and the pages should be numbered.
• Please include a brief author bio in the “comments” section of Submissions Manager.
Prose submissions should be double spaced (20 pages maximum).
Poetry submissions should be single spaced (six poems maximum).
Prose: If a prose piece you’ve submitted gets picked up by another publication, please withdraw it directly through our online Submission Manager (see Submitting Your Manuscript above).
Poetry: If any poem (one or multiple) submitted as part of a batch gets picked up by another publication, please withdraw the submission through our online Submission Manager, delete the unavailable poems, and resubmit the batch.*
* An exception occurs if you submitted before the close of the Submission Period (see Submission Periods above) but need to withdraw a poem within a batch after the close of the Submission Period. If the Submission Period has closed and you still want a portion of your batch considered, do not withdraw your submission (if your resubmission falls outside the Submission Period, we can’t consider it). Instead, if this exception applies to you, please email the editor Ann Neelon with a copy to our general email, explaining your circumstance.
All submission responses come via electronic mail, from newmadrid@murraystate.edu.
We’ve found that because our responses are generated through Submission Manager, they sometimes get filtered. To ensure you receive our messages, please set your email preferences to allow messages from newmadrid@murraystate.edu. Also, you can always check the status of your submission by logging into Submission Manager.
For our terms, we acquire first North American serial rights for one-time use in our print publication.
We also request the author’s permission to post the same piece on this web site, as part of the table of contents for the issue in which it appears (web permission is at the author’s discretion).
