General Submissions – OPEN
Isele Magazine is currently seeking essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and book reviews.
We do not accept multiple submissions, but we do consider simultaneous submissions. Please let us know ASAP if the work submitted has been accepted for publication elsewhere.
Please do not submit previously published works (by this, we mean any piece that has appeared on the web or in print, including your personal blog). However, we will consider a translated version of the work if the original language wasn’t in English.
Please include a brief cover letter with the title(s) of your piece(s) and a third-person bio.
Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Due to the volume of the submissions we receive, we aim to respond within six months, though it can be longer. If you have not heard from us after one year of your submission, please feel free to send a query to editor@iselemagazine.com.
Isele Magazine requests first serial rights of your published piece. However, all rights will revert to you after publication. And, if your work is republished elsewhere, please indicate that it was first published in Isele Magazine.
We pay our contributors a modest token.
Fiction & Nonfiction Submissions
You may submit up to 8, 000 words of prose. Please make sure your manuscript is double-spaced, preferably in Times New Roman or Garamond size 12 font. We rarely publish novel excerpts but have been known to make exceptions.
Send fiction (as a Word document attachment) to fiction.iselemagazine@gmail.com.
Send nonfiction (as a Word document attachment) to nonfiction.iselemagazine@gmail.com.
Poetry
You may submit up to 6 pages of poetry or one long poem. Please submit as a single document.
Send poetry (as Word document attachment) to poetry.iselemagazine@gmail.com.
Visual Art
Please submit as a JPEG or PNG file. We are open to any form of visual art, although we do not accept AI generated artwork.
We prefer to see 8- 10 images. Send artwork to art.iselemagazine@gmail.com.
One visual artist will be chosen/featured for the cover that we use across all social media platforms, as well as online, for each regular Isele issue beginning January 2023. We may publish artwork by more than one artist on the website as space allows.
Please only submit art pieces the artist still retains the rights for. Works that have been previously published, posted, and exhibited are allowed as long as the artist still retains the rights.
Book Reviews
Submit up to 1,500 words. Double-spaced, Times New Roman, size 12 font.
Send book reviews to submissions.iselemagazine@gmail.com.
All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
Call for Submissions: Hedonism – Closed
“Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness – the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.” —Sean O’Casey
For this quarterly issue of Isele Magazine, we are seeking submissions that revolve around hedonism. What makes you happy? What gives you joy? What makes life worth living? We want fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, visual art, and hybrid works that explore this theme.
Send your work to quarterly@iselemagazine.com. The email subject line should read Genre: Lastname (eg Poetry: Angelou).
Deadline: 28 February 2023.
We do not charge submission fees.
We do not accept multiple submissions. Please submit to one genre only.
Simultaneous submissions are okay but please notify us as soon as your work is accepted elsewhere.
Isele Magazine requests the first serial rights of your published piece. However, all rights will revert to you after publication. If your work is republished elsewhere, please indicate that it previously appeared in Isele Magazine. All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
We will respond to every submission no later than two months from the date of submission. If you have not heard from us within two months, please feel free to send a query to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
*All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
Call for Submissions: Food. Nutrition. Sustenance. Community. Culture. – Closed
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
What does food mean to you? Do you eat to live or live to eat?
For this quarterly issue of Isele Magazine, we are seeking submissions that revolve around food. We want fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, visual art, and hybrid works that explore sociological themes around food. Tell us about your recipes passed down through generations, your cultural food and farming practices, a time when food saved or doomed your life, how coca-colonization has affected you, how you envision a world without food insecurity to be. Send us your solarpunk fantasies, biopunk horrors, cli-fi dystopias, and everything in-between.
We accept simultaneous submissions but wish to be alerted if your work is published elsewhere.
We do not charge submission fees.
We will respond to every submission no later than two months from the date of submission. If you have not heard from us within two months, please feel free to send a query to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
Isele Magazine requests the first serial rights of your published piece. However, all rights will revert to you after publication. If your work is republished elsewhere, please indicate that it previously appeared in Isele Magazine.
We pay our contributors a modest token.
All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
Deadline: 11:59 pm CST, October 31, 2022.
Submissions: Send your work to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
The subject line should read: “Genre: Title of Work.”
Photo by Trollinho on Unsplash
Queer Joy – Closed
“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” – Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
Historically, the portrayal of queer people in film and literature left a lot to be desired. This is partly due to regulations such as the 1930 Hays Code (US) that barred studios from producing material showing “offenses” such as race mixing and LGBTQ+ people, among others. Such regulations meant that queer characters had to be coded and not explicitly confirmed as queer. In the Hays Code era, queer characters would often also be the villains who would then be killed off to serve as a loophole for satisfying the regulations. As such, queer characters rarely received happy endings. Similar “morality clauses” have existed and/or continue to exist around the world. Kenya, for example, prohibits material that portrays LGBTQ+ stories in a positive light—the country infamously banned the 2018 Kenyan film, Rafiki, for being a lesbian love story. The legacy of such regulations (and of queerphobia at large) lives on up to today, where queercoding and queerbaiting are both present extensively in media, and where queer joy is often not portrayed explicitly, if at all. And although progress has been made in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights through the years, same-sex relations and gender expression are still widely policed, and cisheteronormativity is violently enforced across the world.
In this quarterly issue, Isele Magazine seeks to center and celebrate queer joy in literature. We seek fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, visual art, and hybrid works that explore the freedom, euphoria, and serenity in the queer existence. We seek work that explores the joy in community, the happiness in being. Send us your fantasies; your stories of family, romance, and friendship; your depictions of queer liberation; and everything in-between. Writers, poets, photographers, and artists who are part of the LGBTQ+ community are welcome to submit. Queer people of color are especially encouraged to submit.
We accept simultaneous submissions but wish to be alerted if your work is published elsewhere.
We do not charge submission fees.
We will respond to every submission no later than two months from the date of submission. If you have not heard from us within two months, please feel free to send a query to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
Isele Magazine requests the first serial rights of your published piece. However, all rights will revert to you after publication. If your work is republished elsewhere, please indicate that it previously appeared in Isele Magazine.
We pay our contributors a modest token.
All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
Deadline: 11:59 pm CST, June 30, 2022.
Submissions: Send your work to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
The subject line should read: “Genre: Title of Work.”
The Reborn Issue – Closed
One could argue that we are all inventors. So often we don new masks, adapting and evolving, inventing and reinventing ourselves, sometimes to our benefit, other times to our detriment.
Here at Isele Magazine, we are fascinated with the concept of re-invention. For this Quarterly issue, we seek submissions that re-tell folktales or reinvent conventional ideas in new and surprising ways.
You can do this in the following ways:
- Do you wish to reimagine ideas that society and culture have told us are the norm? We want you to enthrall us with defiant stories that offer us a new way of seeing the world.
Or,
- Have you ever wished that a character in a folktale you love was given a second chance? That they were further fleshed out? Do you have an idea for a different, better ending? Do you have a modern twist on the story? Perhaps you want it to come to life in a visual medium. Well, consider this your chance.
Submissions are not limited by culture, and they can be in any of the following genres: fiction, creative non-fiction, visual art, poetry, hybrid work, etc.
We accept simultaneous submissions but wish to be informed immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
There are no submission fees.
We will respond to every submission no later than two months from the date of submission. If you do not hear from us within two months, please feel free to send a query to editor@iselemagazine.com.
Isele Magazine requests first serial rights for a published piece. However, all rights revert to the author after publication. If your work is published elsewhere, please make sure to credit Isele Magazine as the previous publisher.
While we acknowledge that every artist deserves remuneration for their art, we have very little funding, but we insist on paying our contributors a modest token.
All accepted submissions are automatically considered for The Isele Prizes.
Deadline: 11:59 pm CST February 25, 2022.
Submissions: Send your work to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
The subject line should read: “Genre: Title of Work.”
Note on folktales:
Cultures all around the world are rich in fairytales, folklore, myths, and legends, which traditionally fall into the public domain (i.e., copyright-free), and which makes them available for use by the public. Archives such as The Public Domain Review provide a great library of resources for works in the public domain. For works that have been produced in more recent times, we suggest you look up their current licensing status and fair use agreements to avoid copyright infringement. Licensing information can be obtained by looking up the title of the work you’re interested in alongside the parties credited for its creation.
The Woman Issue – Closed
This issue comes at a time when the definition, boundaries, and visibility of women are at the forefront of numerous debates. Increasingly, we as a society are questioning womanhood and all its facets. Who is a woman? What makes a woman? What differentiates a woman? And how can we put those who don’t conform to the traditions surrounding womanhood at the forefront of the struggle for equity and justice?
For the December issue of Isele Magazine, we are looking for submissions that don’t necessarily answer these questions but provide meaningful insight into them. We hope to receive works that subvert the tropes and narratives associated with and definitive of womanhood. This exploration can be done through several genres, forms, and mediums. Works are not limited by any theme, motif, or argument. Rather, we aim to put out a variety of work that aids analytical and open-minded thinking as it pertains to womanhood.
Isele Magazine is committed to nuance and the platforming of a range of experiences, identities, and realities. Hence why there are no limits to the medium, be it flash fiction, short fiction, poetry, non-fiction, visual work, hybrid works, etc. We accept simultaneous submissions but wish to be alerted if your work is published elsewhere. There are no submission fees.
We will respond to every submission no later than 2 months from the date of submission. If you have not heard from us within 2 months, please feel free to send a query to editor@iselemagazine.com.
Isele Magazine requests the first serial rights of your published piece. However, all rights will revert to you after publication. And if your work is republished elsewhere, please indicate that it previously appeared in Isele Magazine.
We pay our contributors a modest token.
Deadline: 11:59pm CST on October 22, 2021.
Submissions: Send your work to quarterly@iselemagazine.com.
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