MAYDAY

Main Content

image1
Slide

Submission Guidelines: 
Must be under 1,500 words.
Manuscripts should be a Word or PDF document.
Please use the title of your story as your document name.
Simultaneous submissions are permitted.
All rights revert to the author after publication.

Regular fiction submissions will be closed from September 1st to November 1st, 2023.

The MAYDAY Short Fiction Prize
Slide

Submission Guidelines: 
Manuscripts should be a single Word or PDF document.
Please use the title of your essay as your document name.
Simultaneous submissions are permitted.
All rights revert to the author after publication.

Regular Submissions are welcome throughout the contest.

The MAYDAY Creative Nonfiction Prize
Slide

Submission Guidelines: 
To submit, please send 8-12 pages of poetry.
Please also include a title page and dedication/epigraph.
Individual poems may have been published previously, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished.

Regular submissions will be closed from November 1 to Jan 1, 2023 while we read micro-chapbook submissions.

The MAYDAY Micro-Chapbook Poetry Prize
Open Positions
contests
Learn More
previous arrow
next arrow

POETRY

Spirit Article
by Catherine Chen

“there  was  a war and i  slept  through  most of it.  i  sold buttons  for  buns. my  older  sister  darned soldiers  uniforms  in  search  of  a  husband.  soldiers  were  gainfully  employed.  most   young  men look  good  in  uniform.  one  spring  i  rented  a  room in the working-class neighborhood behind the governors palace.  everyday  i  leapt  […]

FICTION

When the Bough Breaks
by Lesley Bannatyne

I am watching my daughter nursing the baby. She is incandescent, my daughter, like a Renaissance Madonna. Her skin is alabaster and her hair haloes in the sunlight that slips through the kitchen window and slides off the bones of her face. It’s the gorgeous hair some women get while pregnant—mine grew six inches during […]

Gin
by Kate Faigen

Mom and Dad are in the basement playing gin. “Your deal,” Dad says. Mom pours Tanqueray into one of the milk cups we used as children. “GIN,” she shouts, slamming it down.

NONFICTION

The Warrior Is In The Building
by Kelly Piggott

This won’t be on the news. Ten minutes after the announcement, with the classroom door slammed shut and the desks stacked in front of the door, I realized one important fact about the hard lockdown: it wasn’t a drill.  Six middle-school girls—one from the previous period finishing a test, five working on a quiz for […]

Broat
by Jennie Ziegler

[1944, The Ardennes] The buzzing performed nightly. Quiet could settle thick as a tongue onto an uncleared field. In the mornings, men would climb out from the earth like beetles, like living things, to see if someone had left food for their snow-lined stomachs. Or news. Deep in the waking woods, a Midwestern boy huddled […]

TRANSLATION

REVIEWS

You’re the Woods Too by Dennis James Sweeney
Review by Xander Gershberg

Dennis James Sweeney’s You’re the Woods Too—a hybrid collection of interwoven poems, journal entries, visuals, and stage directions—masterfully intervenes on literary and social figurations of nature in evocative language. Early in the collection, the speaker offers a definition of that operative concept: “Nature (n): the part of the world WE cannot control, no matter how […]

CULTURE

Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl: Interview with Cheryl Mukherji
by Palak Godara

The white walls of Cheryl Mukherji’s studio apartment demand you to completely ignore them and direct all your attention to her art. To her art that is painted on them, concealing them; leaning against them, hiding them; or lying next to them, complimenting them. A visual artist and writer currently working as a photo editor […]

Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl:
The Exhibition

Welcome! Cheryl Mukherji is a renowned photographer, and MAYDAY is ecstatic to showcase her immersive art on our virtual walls. Cheryl is an Indian visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In her work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence […]