Frequently Asked Questions

For The Writers accepts submissions year-round and observes a single annual reading period from April 1 through June 30 of each year. For annual submissions, please note this means it is likely you will not hear from our team until this time or shortly thereafter. The timing is deliberate. Writers are naturally inclined to spend longer hours with their work during the colder months, helping to ensure drafts are written, set aside, printed, marked up, and revised again and again. Sentences are cut and reworked. Whole sections move, vanish, or return in a different form. By early spring, many manuscripts have undergone several complete passes place of a single quick sweep. The pages in our queue usually reflect that work. Beginning our reading period in spring means the editorial process starts once those revision cycles have taken place. Editors are reading versions that have already been tested on the page, in writing groups, or with trusted readers. That distance helps everyone involved. It is easier to judge line work, structure, and argument when the writer has already tightened a draft. A fixed reading period also supports rigor and consistency. Concentrating active review within a defined window allows our editorial team to read in sustained blocks, compare pieces side by side, and maintain a consistent standard throughout the season. Each manuscript is considered in relation to the other work under review at the same time and under the same conditions. Submissions that arrive outside the April 1 through June 30 reading period are not discarded. They remain in our queue, automatically roll forward to the next reading period, and are read without requiring resubmission, alongside work shaped during the following winter cycle. We encourage writers to use the colder months for drafting and revision and to submit when the work feels fully settled on the page and ready for editorial review.

For The Writers publishes occasional guest essays on the business and practice of being an author in a publishing landscape shaped by contracts, platforms, and fee-driven services. Guest articles typically document current industry issues, explain how specific systems work, and, from time to time, warn writers about predatory behavior based on personal experience. Continue reading: Guest Contributor Policy.(https://www.forthewriters.com/post/guest-contributor-policy)

For The Writers publishes literary work in four categories: creative nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, and photography. We look for work rooted in lived experience, shaped with close attention to the line, and grounded in places and relationships that feel specific and real. We are particularly drawn to narrative nonfiction, short stories, essays, street photography, and culinary writing that treats kitchens, tables, markets, and service work as serious subjects. We prioritize work that carries consequence and is written with enough plainness and control that a reader feels recognized. We welcome submissions from writers at any stage of their careers. Writers of color, queer and trans writers, writers with disabilities, incarcerated writers, and others who have been sidelined in publishing are encouraged to submit. Selection is based on the strength of the work, the specificity of its lived truth, and the precision of its execution. We do not consider science fiction, fantasy, or other speculative work in any category, nor do we publish work written for children or young adult audiences. Creative Nonfiction We publish essays, memoir, reportage, and hybrid nonfiction from writers around the world. Send work that feels risky to commit to the page. We are not interested in writing that smooths over damage with a neat lesson or a quick promise that everything will be fine. Write about the sibling who stopped speaking to you after the will was read. Write about the months when you hid a relapse from your partner. Write about the year you stayed with a boss who harassed you because you needed health insurance. Write about the day you signed discharge papers, knowing you could not pay the bill. Write about the moment you chose silence when you wanted to say what could not be taken back. These pieces require plain speech and the willingness to let strangers see what you did, what you allowed, and what was done to you. The risk has to be matched by control on the page. Strong submissions build scenes from memory and verifiable detail, place the writer and the people within the story within a clear timeline, and show how understanding shifts over the course of the work. That can take the form of a chronological arc that carries the reader through a single season, a braided structure that moves between illness and work, or a segmented form that returns to one recurring image until its meaning changes. We look for nonfiction that has undergone revision, is honest about what can and cannot be known, and treats real people on the page with care and specificity. Fiction We publish literary fiction built on strong character work, deliberate structure, and sentence-level control. We consider short stories and novel excerpts only when they stand on their own as complete works. Send the story that puts the reader inside a life with pressure, consequence, and change. That can be a fight at the kitchen table that rewrites the next ten years. It can be a staff meeting where a promotion is decided through careful half-sentences. It can be a campus friendship that fractures over one night and never repairs. It can be a patrol officer driving the same route for the thousandth time. It can be a group chat where a joke lands and a relationship ends in the same thread. Domestic work, workplace narratives, campus stories, realist crime, and social satire are welcome when the writing is anchored in concrete detail and consequence. We are drawn to fiction that follows cause and effect and stays with what decisions cost over days, months, and years. We want work that shows how families, jobs, institutions, and neighborhoods shape the people inside them. Form can be spare or intricate, linear or fragmented, but a careful reader must be able to track the movement of the story and understand what is at stake in each scene. All fiction we publish takes place in a recognizable world. Streets have names, laws have consequences, and bodies have limits. We do not consider work built on invented cosmologies, magic systems, alternate timelines, or other speculative frameworks. Poetry We publish poems that reward careful, attentive reading. We consider formal work, free verse, prose poems, and hybrid forms when choices of line, image, and structure are deliberate and sustained across the poem. Send the poem that stays with the conditions of a day. It might unfold at a kitchen table after an argument, in a parking lot outside a store that is closing, in a hospital corridor at shift change, during a long stretch of work, in a sequence of messages on a phone, or inside a sentence you have returned to for years. The setting should be specific, and the situation should carry pressure. We are drawn to poems about relationships, grief, desire, faith and doubt, neighborhood and place, illness, work, money, and the forces that shape private lives. Lines should be controlled and purposeful, and the syntax should allow a careful general reader to follow the movement of thought. Strong poems leave the reader with a concrete image, phrase, or shift in understanding that changes how a detail or moment is perceived. Photography For The Writers publishes photographic work that can stand alongside the writing and maintain a coherent editorial standard. We consider single images, short sequences, and photographic essays, with particular interest in architectural studies, street photography, and black-and-white work with strong contrast and decisive shadows. We are drawn to photographs that register structure and pattern in the built world and that attend to facades, corridors, stairwells, signage, bus stops, storefront glass, and the overlooked corners where people move through a city without looking up. Strong submissions use framing, light, and sequencing to establish meaning, so that a set of photographs can carry a narrative line or a clear point even without accompanying text. Images may be documentary or staged, but they must remain anchored in the real world and in the texture of actual places. We do not review photography created primarily to illustrate speculative or fantastical scenes.