Passages North publishes one annual print issue and weekly bonus content throughout the school year. Subs to shorts, poetry, and nonfiction/hybrid categories are usually open from September 1 through April 15. Fiction is open September 1 through October 15, and January 1 through February 15. While we allow authors to have active submission in different genres, we ask that you use your best judgement and avoid overloading our editors. Additionally, we accept simultaneous submissions, but ask that you withdraw the piece and let us know as soon as it is accepted elsewhere. See specific genre guidelines below.
Passages North welcomes submissions from anybody. We are an accomplice to LGBTQIA+ communities, Black Lives Matter, and abolitionist movements wherever they may be found, comprised itself of many editors at the intersections of various communities, so we strongly encourage BIPOC, disabled, economically marginalized, and queer and trans writers to submit. Though Passages North does not pay contributors at this time, we promise to treat your work with care and to shout our love via our social media platforms. Contributors receive two copies of their issue of the magazine.
Please be mindful of our editorial staff when you submit to Passages North. Before you click submit, consider that our staff is comprised of queer editors, editors of color, editors with their own personal histories of assault and trauma and disability. Certainly, we understand how difficulties of living in a highly imperfect world can and should make their way onto the page in our creative work, and PN is excited to publish work that handles those difficulties with nuance. If you’re wondering if your submission needs a content warning, go ahead and add it to your document and know that we appreciate your care.
Send us your image/text projects, your collages, your graphic essays and stories. Tell us true things, but make them visual.
The Passages North poetry editors are looking for work that is honest, conscious of craft and form, knows rules and breaks them, owns its transgressions, and challenges conventions. We want to feel punches to the gut and goosebumps of excitement. Send us poetry that gets us discussing, questioning, and thinking. We are very much open to poems that are experimental or nontraditional and also encourage submissions that encompass diverse voices and experiences.
Please submit a packet of 1-5 poems for consideration. If you need to withdraw part of your submission, leave us a note in Submittable.
Genre editor: Patricia Killelea
Send us up to three short-shorts or five mircos (fiction, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids) all pasted into one document.
On brand for our Short-Shorts: density + clarity, mystery + directness, magic + cold, science, diverse worlds and voices, an attention to the sentence, a final image or turn that breaks a reader, honesty about trouble, meditations that make us feel lost but not alone, restraint, suggestion, that image that makes us stop and re-read, robots, alternative histories, guilty pleasure pop culture, embarrassing obsessions, how to keep on trucking. That said, though, we try to publish an unlikely array of stories, so sometimes a straight narrative story with a punch gets us too.
What matters is that your short-short feels bigger and more important than the space should allow. Try us.
We're not sticklers about word count, but if pressed we'd cap the genre at 1000 words per story but know we love tiny pieces just as much and maybe even more. If you need to withdraw part of your submission, please leave us a note via Submittable.
Genre editor: Jennifer A. Howard
We're looking for all manner of well-written, innovative creative nonfiction (up to 8000 words) including, but not limited to, lyric essays, personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism. We enjoy work that pays attention to form and language—whether traditionally or experimentally—and explores and challenges the boundaries of the genre. We seek work that is pathologically curious. That said, our primary concern is not with one particular component of creative nonfiction, but with the quality of the work.
In addition to standard (whatever that means) submissions, Passages North wants your hybrid work. Send us your orphans, your bastards, your bumpings, and your grindings, whether whimsical, grave, or neither.
Genre editor: Matthew Gavin Frank
We are open for fiction submissions from Sept 1-October 15 and from Jan 1-Feb 15.
Please send us your best short story, 1000 - 8000 words in length. The Passages North team has diverse interests; so send us your weird, your experimental, your speculative, your genre-bending, your brave, risk-taking work. We are looking for unique, impactful, powerful voices. We’d love to read stories featuring settings we’ve never seen, situations we couldn’t have imagined, and characters that pull us in for the ride. That said, we love the quiet ones too—the ones we’ve seen before but still hit and burn softly in the back of our brains for weeks. We want your entertaining stories and your emotional stories. A good way to win us over is through great dialogue, a propulsive first page, and an ending that either leaves us completely satisfied or begging for more. In particular, we are looking to publish stories about underrepresented people by underrepresented writers. Don’t be afraid to send us your stories that hit close to home—we promise to treat them with care.
Genre editor: Esperanza Vargas Macias
We always want to keep regular submissions free, but if you'd like to contribute a small donation to PN, this is the spot. Your contribution helps us showcase literature that matters. Rocket Fuel submissions will be processed at the same rate, and with the same consideration, as regular submissions. We can't tell you how much we appreciate your generosity. Thank you!