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Passages North is open to submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, hybrids, and short-shorts of all genres. Visit our Submittable page for guidelines, to order issues and t-shirts, and to send us your work.
Passages North publishes one print issue a year, as well as weekly online bonus content throughout the school year. We welcome submissions from everybody. We are an accomplice to LGBTQIA+ communities, Black Lives Matter, and abolitionist movements wherever they may be found, and we are comprised of editors at the intersections of various communities, so we strongly encourage BIPOC, disabled, economically marginalized, and queer and trans writers to submit. To get a better sense of what we like to see in submissions, see our specific genre guidelines.
A few things to keep in mind when submitting:
Though Passages North does not pay contributors at this time, we promise to treat your work with care and to shout our love via our social media platforms. Contributors receive two copies of their issue of the magazine.
Subs to shorts, poetry, and nonfiction/hybrid categories are usually open from September 1 through April 15.
Fiction is open September 1 through October 15, and January 1 through February 15.
While we allow authors to have active submissions in different genres, we ask that you use your best judgment and avoid overloading our editors.
We accept simultaneous submissions, but we ask that if a piece is accepted elsewhere, you withdraw the piece and let us know immediately.
If we're closed when we would otherwise be open, it's because we've hit our free submission limit for the month. Please check back on the first of the next calendar month or submit through our Rocket Fuel category for a small fee.
Please be mindful of our editorial staff when you submit your writing to Passages North. Before you click submit, consider that our staff encompasses queer editors, editors of color, and editors with their own personal histories of assault and trauma and disability. Certainly, we understand how difficulties of living in a highly imperfect world can and should make their way onto the page in our creative work, and we are excited to publish work that handles those difficulties with nuance. If you’re wondering if your submission needs a content warning, go ahead and add it to your document and know that we appreciate your care.
We look forward to reading your work!
Genre Guidelines:
Fiction Submissions
We are open for fiction submissions from Sept 1-October 15 and from Jan 1-Feb 15.
Please send us your best short story, 1000 - 8000 words in length. The Passages North team has diverse interests; so send us your weird, your experimental, your speculative, your genre-bending, your brave, risk-taking work. We are looking for unique, impactful, powerful voices. We’d love to read stories featuring settings we’ve never seen, situations we couldn’t have imagined, and characters that pull us in for the ride. That said, we love the quiet ones too—the ones we’ve seen before but still hit and burn softly in the back of our brains for weeks. We want your entertaining stories and your emotional stories. A good way to win us over is through great dialogue, a propulsive first page, and an ending that either leaves us completely satisfied or begging for more. In particular, we are looking to publish stories about underrepresented people by underrepresented writers. Don’t be afraid to send us your stories that hit close to home—we promise to treat them with care.
Genre editor: Esperanza Vargas Macias
Poetry Submissions
The Passages North poetry editors are looking for work that is honest, conscious of craft and form, knows rules and breaks them, owns its transgressions, and challenges conventions. We want to feel punches to the gut and goosebumps of excitement. Send us poetry that gets us discussing, questioning, and thinking. We are very much open to poems that are experimental or nontraditional and also encourage submissions that encompass diverse voices and experiences.
Please submit a packet of 1-3 poems for consideration. If you need to withdraw part of your submission, leave us a note in Submittable.
Genre editor: Patricia Killelea
nonfiction/hybrids submissions
We're looking for all manner of well-written, innovative creative nonfiction (up to 6500 words) including, but not limited to, lyric essays, personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism. We enjoy work that pays attention to form and language—whether traditionally or experimentally—and explores and challenges the boundaries of the genre. We seek work that is pathologically curious. That said, our primary concern is not with one particular component of creative nonfiction, but with the quality of the work.
In addition to standard (whatever that means) submissions, Passages North wants your hybrid work. Send us your orphans, your bastards, your bumpings, and your grindings, whether whimsical, grave, or neither.
Genre editor: Matthew Gavin Frank
short-short submissions
Send us up to three short-shorts (fiction, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids) all pasted into one document. For us, a short-short is anything beneath 1000 words (though we’re not bean counters).
On brand for our short-shorts: snowy + magical, density + clarity, mystery, precision, diverse worlds and voices, honesty, restraint, suggestion, an image that makes us stop and re-read, meditations that make us feel lost but not alone, a final moment that breaks us.
If you need to withdraw part of your submission, please leave us a note via Submittable.
Genre editor: Jennifer A. Howard
visual essay submissions
We love experimental CNF forms so much that we made a whole new category! In Visual Essay, we are seeking work that plays on the page, bringing in color, texture, dimension; we're drawn to pieces in which the look is as meaningful as the content. We'd like to consider new meanings of the word "collage." Draw us in, consider the physicality of your work in our hands, turn us into Flat Stanley as we traverse the 2d space... and of course, above all, give us work that is curious and compelling.
Genre editor: Matthew Gavin Frank