SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Thank you for trusting us with your work. We’re a very small team, and responses may take up to four weeks. Every submission is read with the utmost care, and we appreciate your patience.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are a mixed media zine and will consider any piece adhering to our designated theme. Please submit only one piece per issue. If your work is accepted, we kindly ask that you wait one full reading period before submitting again, to help us maintain a diverse range of voices.

We are looking for:

• Short fiction (soft limit 1000 words)
• Poetry
• Non-fiction (soft limit 1500 words)
• Art (leaning towards collages and linocuts – but we’ll consider anything)
• Hybrid works

Use a legible 12pt font (Times New Roman or Calibri preferred) and standard margins. We accept submissions as a .docx file or .pdf if necessary. All work should be unpublished. We accept (and encourage) simultaneous submissions, but please inform us as soon as possible if your piece gets accepted elsewhere.

If your work is longer, you might want to consider our chapbook series. We publish lyric essays, poetry, and prose up to 10,000 words. You can email us your proposal at papershell.subs@gmail.com. Due to the volume of submissions, we only accepted pitches for our chapbook series – we are a small team, so reading longer works is rather challenging. Please don’t let that discourage you! Submit your pitch, and we will get in touch.

Email submissions to papershell.subs@gmail.com with the subject line: SUBMISSION TYPE / Title. Submissions are read blind. Please include a short author bio (100 words max) in third person in a separate attachment. If you could tell us what your piece is about in one or two sentences, within the body of the email, it will really make us smile!

We are looking for the weird, the experimental, the avant-garde. We have a zero-tolerance policy for the use of AI.