GENERAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Submissions are open as of January 1, 2020, for fiction, creative nonfiction, audio-visual, The Loop, translations, art, interviews, and book reviews. Submissions are closed for poetry while we continue going through many years of backlog.
ACM is now online only. If you feel so moved, please "like" and follow ACM on Facebook and Twitter.
Submit only one prose piece at time. We will respond to it as quickly as we can, and as soon as we do, you’re free to submit again. Unless submissions are closed.
Yes, you can submit your work here and elsewhere simultaneously, but please let us know as soon as possible if your work has been accepted for publication.
As a rule, we don't re-publish work. Occasionally, we publish pieces that have been published elsewhere, especially if they speak to different audiences. Please do tell us if you’re piece has been published on your blog, in a regional magazine, on your garage door, or in The New Yorker.
The fiction reader reads and evaluate fiction and participate in phone meetings with fiction editor and other readers. Please send your resume/cv and a note telling us why you'd like the position and how your reading and writing experience has prepared you for the job. Please also tell us what you think of a few of our published stories. Unfortunately, none of us is paid. We hope to someday change that.
We are looking for an art editor to choose art to accompany our fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. ACM occasionally published portfolios of one artist’s work. To apply:
Please send a resume/cv with a note telling us why you're interested in the job and detailing your art experience.
Unfortunately, none of our editors is paid. We will be applying for grants and hope to change that.
ACM recognizes the power of a diverse community and encourages applications from individuals with varied experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. ACM is committed to diversity and all qualified applicants will receive consideration and will not be discriminated against based on citizenship status, age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. We are proud that Chicago is a sanctuary city.
We welcome audio art and original music, experimental and independent film, poetry, fiction, nonfiction. Duration should be from about six to 10 minutes. Interviews may be longer.
Potential contributors must:
· be the work’s original creator or an appropriate representative of it;
· vouch that ACM can present their work without breaching law or contracts pertinent to the work.
Baseline technical qualifications for submissions:
- Audio – mp3 file format, two-channel (stereo); 128 kbits/sec encoding
- Video – mp4 (H.264) file format, 1080p-HD with playback anywhere from 24 to 30 frames/sec; two-channel (stereo) sound; minimum of 5 Mbits/sec encoding
The audio or video media itself should be submitted. URLs to YouTube, Vimeo or the like may not be considered, and URLs open to the full public may be less so.
Short theater pieces, monologues, excerpts of longer work.
Memoir, reported essays, braided essays, collages, vignettes, extremely literary journalism, oral history, meditations. Short, long, medium. Political in the largest sense.
Short, long, medium; realistic, surrealistic; traditional, fragmented. Surprise us.
We publish reviews and review-essays of books that are of interest to curious generalists (not academic specialists): fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, history, politics, sociology, art, biography, and more. We also publish reviews of other arts. We encourage creativity in reviews. They can be in almost any format: list, personal essay, collage, etc. If you'd like to review for us, please use this form to tell us what genres you prefer. If you have a specific book in mind, please let us know of your relationship, if any, to the author. Just about all of the books we review are published by small presses. We rarely review books published by large commercial presses.
We publish thumbnails with each work of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and welcome all sorts of media.We also publish portfolios of an artist's work (including photographers). Please query with a link to your web site or attachments.
Please query. We believe that the best interviews are done in person, to allow for liveliness and spontaneity. Second-best is via telephone or Skype. We appreciate your providing us, with your interview, a photo of the person, taken by you or the subject's PR empire. We appreciate it even more if the interview is timely; see Cara Suglich's interview with George Saunders about his winning of the Booker Prize. When you query, please let us know your relationship, if any, to the subject.
The Loop (Art/Power) features mostly nonfiction of most kinds, accompanied by art of most kinds. We welcome reportage, oral histories, review-essays, meditations, collage essays, political ruminations, travel pieces, your weird experimentalisms, interviews, critiques, and forms we haven’t thought of. THE COMBINATION OF ART AND TEXT IS IMPORTANT FOR THE LOOP. You can include your own photos/art work or those in the public domain; it’s fun to search digital collections such as those offered by the New York Public Library, National Gallery of Art, The Met and Pexels. The site 99designs contains links to 30 free-access image web sites, including The British Library and the delightful Public Domain Review. Or you might favor Medieval woodcuts or Victorian clipart. You might prefer a roundup of vintage clipart sites. Just don’t get lost in the art. Or if you do, write about it. Feel free, also, to include video and sound art.
This portal is here to receive REQUESTED revisions. Please do not send anything else this way. Thanks for your forbearance.
STOP now if you're thinking of sending something besides the above.