Please email your submission attached as a Word.doc, with your cover letter in the body of the email, to bigcitylitsubmissions@gmail.com.

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.

While we welcome book reviews, we do not have an in-house reviewer to write them, so please do not query unless you already have a review written. 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We only consider unpublished material.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.

We are currently closed for submissions, but plan to reopen soon. We’ll post when we’re open as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.