GENERAL SUBMISSIONS
General Submission Notes
Poetry, fiction, nonfiction and reviews are accepted through Submittable only. Please send no more than five poems, two short-shorts, one story, or one essay per submission. For reviews, we accept pitches or completed pieces; see guidelines below.
You can find more information about what our genre editors would like to read under Submission Calls below.
General submissions open on August 15 and close December 15.
Our annual prose and poetry contests run each spring.
We aim to respond to submissions within four months, but sometimes things take longer than we’d like. Please do not query us on the status of your submission until six months have elapsed.
Cost of Submission
General submissions require a submission fee of $3.00 per submission to help pay for online submission services. Submissions in more than one genre should be submitted separately and require separate submission fees.
If our fee presents financial hardship, please contact us at fugue@uidaho.edu so that we can offer you a fee-free submission option.
Simultaneous Submissions
We consider simultaneous submissions (submissions sent concurrently to another journal or journals) as long as you let us know in the cover letter that this is the case and notify us immediately if a piece has been accepted elsewhere.
SUBMISSION CALLS
Fiction
Send us the stories that need to be out in the world. The ones we couldn’t ask you to send us, because we don’t yet know we need them. Whether you’re trying something old in a way we haven’t seen, or something new in a way that feels immediately classic, we want to read the stories you make essential: the voice that we can’t get out of our head, the off-kilter narrative, the questions that don’t have ready answers. Surprise us.
We are especially eager to be a platform for voices that are consciously, unconsciously, and systemically underrepresented.
While we love reading stories of all lengths, it is more difficult to make space for anything over 15 pages in Fugue.
Finally, we know the anxiety of submission; we are grateful for your trust and look forward to reading your stories.
Nonfiction
We're here for literary nonfiction broadly conceived—from personal essaying attentive to the largeness of the self, to flash and hybrid works that excite with the power of concision and juxtaposition, to works that incorporate criticism and theory in an unconventional way. We want to read essays that weigh their parts judiciously and/or with reckless abandon, that play with their own constructedness and seek to slip or strike their way into a larger conversation. We especially enjoy a clear voice, genre-bending and tradition-warping, surprising language, structural daring, and electric attention to the twists and turns of intellection. In any case, we are looking for a compelling narrative (or maybe make that record) of inquiry and discovery, one that makes us think, see things fresh, feel more fully alive.
Pieces longer than 15 pages are not disqualified from consideration, but they are unlikely to be accepted—so if you've got to go long, make it astonishing.
We eagerly welcome, encourage, and crave submissions from Black, Indigenous, queer and trans folks, writers of color, and disabled writers, and we hope to include both established and new voices in our pages. We can't wait to read your work.
Poetry
Send us your risks and outcasts, your vulnerable, transparent, and revealing constructions. Send us your resistances, spells, and curses. Send us your poems that embrace the unknown, your poems from monsters and to monsters. We want freshness—the poems that disrupt language, startle, surprise, and engage with the world like no other.
We’re invested in poetry as an inclusive space—we want to uplift and honor work from poets of underrepresented socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, sexualities, races, and ethnicities.
Please send 3-5 poems with a maximum submission length of 10 pages. Send all poems in one document.
Art and Hybrid Forms
We’re interested in art that tells a story through experimental and playful forms. Send us your paintings, photographs, collages, videos, dances, screenprints, drawings, sculptures, textiles, electronics, audio files, and other uncategorizable art.
Make us a comet out of leaves, a portal out of sticks, or a body out of water bottles. Dazzle us with art that plays with proportion, movement, color, body, shape, and value.
We have a broad concept of what constitutes art and hybrid forms, so we’d love to engage with work that portrays your definition. Whether your art tells a story about social/cultural/political experiences through layers of text and juxtaposition of mediums, or whether it depicts personal experiences that play with colors, space, and sounds—we want to experience it.
Submit your work in a single document as a .pdf, .doc or .docx, .jpg, .png, .mp3, or .mp4 file; if we accept your work for publication, we will communicate with you about image quality and how we can best showcase your work. If you’re sending us multiple pieces, please indicate whether those are stand-alone works or part of a series.
Please also include a brief artist statement that describes your project and contextualizes your art practice.
Reviews and Interviews
Fugue accepts both review pitches and submissions of finished reviews. We’ve featured reviews in the past and are excited to update our call and feature these more frequently online.
We are seeking pieces by writers who engage with books on both a critical and a personal level. We aim to publish reviews that would have trouble finding a home elsewhere—reviews that push the boundaries of the criticism genre (think personal narrative, think fabulism, think essays that include conversations amongst multiple texts, think of lit crit that reaches out into discussion of music and movies and art).
Fugue is interested in thoughtful and artful explorations of what you’re reading, be it old or new; we’re as interested in hidden gems as we are in new releases. We have a special magnetism toward reviews of small press books, books in translation, and books that present something rare in a rapidly homogenizing publishing landscape. We’re especially looking for long takes (while we don’t have a word count in mind, we hope to have plenty of time to be immersed in your view). Make us think with our heads and our hearts. And most of all, remind us why we love the written word.
While we accept simultaneous submissions, please do us the courtesy of notifying us immediately when a work is accepted elsewhere.
In your submission, please include a brief bio. Also include the full title, author, publisher, and publication year of the book(s) you are reviewing.
We are also accepting pitches for interviews via fuguereviews@gmail.com.
Looking for information about our annual contest?