Ruby Magazine/ Call for Submissions (How to Submit)
RUBY is a bi-annual literary magazine and press that publishes short-form food narratives that strive for voice, artistry, and character. They want work that grabs readers and doesn’t let go—fierce prose they wish they had written.
Send Ruby Magazine your literary, genre-nonconforming, experimental, hybrid, surprising, tender, painful words. Food narratives are vulnerable narratives, stories of belonging, identity, justice, disparities, and community. Food is biography. Our experiences with food almost immediately become storied. They accept essays on food as well.
Eligibility Guidelines for Ruby Magazine
- RUBY reads submissions for its literary magazine twice during the year from March 1 to April 30 and from October 1 to November 30. Submit only within these periods.
- Submissions are free.
- Submissions are welcome from world wide entries.
Submission Guidelines for Ruby Magazine
- RUBY reviews submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid works up to 1,000 words and themed essays up to 2,000 words. They do not consider unsolicited, previously published work.
- All previously unpublished submissions should appear in English.
- Translations are welcome and should be accompanied by a copy of the original, previously unpublished text along with a statement certifying permission to publish from the translation rights holder.
- Please submit to one genre per reading period.
- If you choose to submit flash narratives for consideration, you may send up to three pieces in a single document.
- RUBY welcomes traditional as well as experimental and hybrid forms of the essay of any length up to 2,000 words that challenge and reinvent the conventions of the genre that answers to our reading period theme. Should your essay rely on reportage and research, please be prepared to provide documentation of your sources for fact-checking.
- Like language, food is interpretable and symbolic, and it serves to make meaning as narrative. When we describe what we eat—how we prepare and experience it, where we obtain it, the spaces in which we eat, and how we share it—or don’t—we reveal who we and our characters are.
- The essay theme for the reading period October 1 to November 30 is bittersweet.
- Submit using only Submittable.
- Please notify RUBY immediately if your simultaneous submission is accepted for publication elsewhere.
Good Luck!
