SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Email all submissions to bigcitylitsubmissions@gmail.com.

Send your cover letter in the body of the email with your submission attached as a PDF or Word.doc.

Our word limit for fiction and creative non-fiction (personal essay, book reviews) is 5,000 words. Novel excerpts will only be considered if they can stand alone. We accept flash fiction with a 1000 word maximum. For poetry, please send up to 5 pages of poems (only 1 per page). Poems longer than 1 page are acceptable, but do not submit multiple poems on a single page. Do not submit more than 5 poems.

We are a non-paying publication, for the time being.

We only consider unpublished material. Simultaneous submissions will be considered but please indicate this in your cover letter and withdraw your submission immediately if accepted elsewhere.

Please use Times New Roman, 12-point font, 1-inch margins, with all prose double-spaced and all poetry single-spaced. Make sure your name and contact info appear on the first page of your submission.

Only submit once per genre, per reading period. Do not send another submission until you have heard back from us about the first. If you have been published in BigCityLit we kindly ask that you wait for 2 submission cycles to go by before submitting again.

Our submission periods are January 15th—May 15th for the Summer issue and August 15th—December 15th for the Winter issue. Any submissions received outside these windows will be discarded without review.