GENERAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We are open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, interviews, and reviews, and art. We charge a small fee for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions to cover the cost of Submittable. We waive the fee for BIPOC writers as a small form of literary reparations. Thanks for thinking of ACM.
ACM is now online only. If you feel so moved, please "like" and follow ACM on Facebook and Twitter.
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. Maybe once every few years we publish a piece that was published elsewhere.
Palestinian Voices: We are looking for poetry by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora. We seek the immediate and the personal, the concrete and specific. Please feel free to send queries.
Another Chicago Magazine is seeking a new logo. We desire cohesion across our website, email communications, social media, website. While we include artwork with each piece, the magazine does not have a color palette or strong visual identity.
The designer whose logo is selected will receive the prize of a $100 bookshop.org gift card.
- The words “Another Chicago Magazine” should be prominent.
- We use “ACM” frequently, so the acronym should also be part of the logo.
- Our mission: We love work that is personal and political and shows that you can write beautifully and incisively about important subjects. That’s hard to portray, but a logo could include a schematic skyline of Chicago or map that shows the city or a symbol of the city.
- We’re independent of a university or other institution. We publish translations and a new feature, No Place is Foreign, so we’d like to indicate that we include the world. Our readers are also international.
- We publish two pieces weekly. That might be represented, too.
Current logos here: https://www.instagram.com/anotherchimag/ and here: https://twitter.com/anotherchimag (The moose goes with our advertising for the residency in Maine.)
Palestinian Voices: We are looking for creative work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora. We seek the immediate and the personal, the concrete and specific. Please feel free to send queries.
Palestinian Voices: We are looking for nonfiction work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora. We seek the immediate and the personal, the concrete and specific. Please feel free to send queries.
Palestinian Voices: We are looking for creative fiction work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora. We seek the immediate and the personal, the concrete and specific. Please feel free to send queries.
No Place is Foreign seeks stories, poems, and essays from writers around the world to highlight perspectives traditionally deemed foreign within US-centric writing. We seek to avoid travel narratives from outsiders to these regions. and instead to focus on the authentic voices and perspectives of insiders.
Please identify the genre for your submission in your cover letter.
ACM seeks a managing editor for leadership of magazine operations. ACM comprises approximately 20 staff, all of whom contribute on a volunteer basis.
Core responsibilities include the following, for which the time commitment should equal roughly 20 hours per month.
- Guide decision making with executive editor and assoc. managing editor; participate in monthly staff meetings and weekly operational meetings with executive committee
- Collaborate on developing quarterly external newsletter
- Pinch hit to read submissions as necessary
- Manage our small budget
- Seek and apply for grants
- Manage process for anthology submissions (Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize, anthologies, etc.)
- Copy edit and proofread content before it is published (as needed)
- Participate in Zoom calls/in-person meetings with staff candidates
- Supervise interns
- Occasionally provide coverage with posting content to Wordpress site
- Nice to have: operational management of softwares and tools (Bookshop.org commissions, Stripe, PayPal, general programs needed to manage Wordpress, etc.)
Submissions that do not include a publication date with the excerpt title will be automatically declined. Submissions must be in an editable format -- no .pdfs please.
Do you have a book, collection, or anthology forthcoming from an independent press? Send us an excerpt! We want to share sections from upcoming works in advance of their full release to drum up excitement about new indie books. We're seeking both poetry and prose.
Please include information about your upcoming book, the publisher, and expected release date in your cover letter. PLEASE do not send the whole ms. Send us one or two stories or essays, or up to three poems--all as yet unpublished.
If you have a bit to spare.... We're all volunteers and every so often we use our own money to pay for odds and ends like postage to send a book to a review editor or copies of pieces to Best Americans. You may think we're chutzpahdik to put out our virtual tip jar, since we ask you to pay a bit to submit in some categories. That helps cover our Submittable subscription. Otherwise we'd be drowning in envelopes, as in the old days. And we know how it's annoying to pay for what might turn out to be a rejection. Who told you to choose this life anyway? As Saroyan wrote:
Iowa said, “I just got in from Salinas. No work in the lettuce fields. Going north now, to Portland; …”
I wanted to tell him how it was with me: rejected story from Scribner’s, rejected essay from The Yale Review, no money for decent cigarettes, worn shoes, old shirts, but I was afraid to make something of my own troubles. A writer’s troubles are always boring, a bit unreal. People are apt to feel, Well, who asked you to write in the first place? A man must pretend not to be a writer.
I said, “Good luck, north”… Fine boy, hope he isn’t dead, hope he hasn’t frozen, mighty cold these days.”
We publish art 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.
We welcome audio art and original music, experimental and independent film, poetry, fiction, nonfiction of any length.
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.
We seek reviews of books published by small and university presses, because the Big Five or so have a relatively easier time getting their books noticed. We welcome reviews of fiction, poetry, and creative and other nonfiction that use a political/analytical lens to view self, others, and society. In lit reviews, we want to learn about the book's place in contemporary literature, where it stands in relation to trends, style and tradition. We welcome books that resist and books that question the status quo. And we’re especially interested in reviews of nonfiction trade books that address incarceration and liberation. As for style of review, we’re open to personal essay and experimental reviews, as well as traditional. If you would like to review a specific book, please let us know of your relationship, if any, to the author. Please note that we don't publish reviews by friends of the author or blurbers or blurbees of same.
We welcome translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama (including excerpts from novels or from full-length plays). Please submit the original text along with your translation. If we wish to publish the translation, we'll need written permission from the writer.
If you're submitting a re-translation, please provide a note explaining why you think a new translation is warranted.
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.