Thanks for considering MAYDAY as a home for your work. We appreciate the time that goes into your work and wish you the best in finding an audience, at MAYDAY and beyond.
We read year-round and do not consider previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are accepted and encouraged, but please withdraw your piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere.
We aim to respond within three months from the date of submission. If you have not received a response after this time, feel free to query us through the “messages” section in Submittable. After you’ve heard back from us, feel free to submit again.
Payment for work published at MAYDAY is according to the following flat rates:
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Book Reviews and Interviews: $20
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Creative Nonfiction: $20
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Culture: $20
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Fiction: $20
- MAYDAY:Black: $50
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Poetry: $10
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Translation: $20 (stories), $10 (poems)
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Visual Art: $10
See below for additional departmental guidelines. When you’re ready to submit, head over to our online submission manager.
ART
We endeavor to pair every piece of writing published on MAYDAY with original art by working artists. Accepted visual art will be featured at the top of a story, poem, translation, or essay that highlights or engages with the image. We’re particularly interested in work that is critical, experimental, inclusive, progressive, and/or represents an alternative to mainstream pieces. Artists of all perspectives, backgrounds, and voices are encouraged to submit. Otherwise, there are no particular requirements.
Please submit no more than five high-resolution JPEG files that include the title in the file name, along with a brief cover letter describing your work’s intention and a 150-word max, third-person bio. For art submissions, please submit through Duosuma.
BOOK REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
We publish reviews (typically 1,000-1,500 words) of books either forthcoming or published in the last six months, preferably from small presses. MAYDAY reviews place a book within a tradition, use it to form another self-contained argument, or address the defining qualities of the book—its form, voice, and themes. We want reviews to answer: What questions is the book asking? What is it reflecting? Reviewers should have an argument that draws on specific moments and quotes text. We’re also interested in interviews with contemporary artists, writers, critics, and other notable cultural figures.
Please submit your reviews and interviews through the relevant department’s Submittable form.
CULTURE
The new MAYDAY Culture vertical invites and cultivates authenticity, curiosity, and compassion with well-rounded criticism and courageous storytelling. With an emphasis on diverse or marginalized perspectives, especially Black writers and LGBTQ+ writers, Culture explores race, politics, gender, sexuality, and ability across literature, cinema, television, music, art, video games, and theatre, with an emphasis on contemporary and historical contextualization. We appreciate arts criticism that amplifies unique perspectives and complicates our understandings—whether through personal or braided essays or media reviews—and we regard this type of writing as an art form in its own right.
We’re seeking well-rounded, literary pieces that challenge us and our readers. There’s no minimum length, but we prefer submissions of fewer than 6,000 words. Please send only one Culture submission at a time.
Find editors’ bios and contact information on Submittable. We welcome pitches by email.
FICTION
Note that fiction submissions will be closed in July 2023 to catch up on our reading. We will reopen for submissions to the MAYDAY Fiction Prize on September 1. Regular submissions will reopen on November 15.
Thanks for considering MAYDAY as a home for your fiction. We are interested in original and engaging literary short fiction. We love innovative, strong writing that trusts the reader and is true to its author regardless of genre. We are committed to featuring a diverse range of content and authors, including LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and international voices.
Popular authors we believe fit this vision include writers such as Carmen Machado, Jeanette Winterson, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong, Yaa Gyasi, Ali Smith, Tommy Orange, Saeed Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Etgar Keret, Shelly Oria, Aimee Bender, Pedro Cabiya, China Miéville, and Olga Tokarczuk, among others.
We will carefully consider works of prose from 300-3000 words. Please only send one full-length submission at a time or up to three flash fiction/short-short submissions, under 1,000 words each.
MAYDAY:BLACK
Carla Bell, founding director of MAYDAY:Black, is committed to delivering a new experience for Black writers, including those seeking first-time publication.
We welcome nonfiction work in opinions and analyses; personal, braided, and reported essays in contemporary and historical contexts.
Bring your authentic, curious, courageous, well-rounded stories on life, living, love, loss, representation, race, racism, death, dying, Black plight and civil rights, neighborhood blight, gentrification, white flight, and more. (In no way is this an exhaustive list!)
Pitch MD:B story ideas to carla.bell@newamericanpress.com, and send MD:B story drafts via Submittable for free from anywhere in the world. English only, please.
NONFICTION
We seek personal, critical, and hybrid essays that move, engage, and transport us and our readers. We are sure to respond to many things, but a strong authorial voice, a clear thought or experiential arc grounded in a sense of place, and some connection with a writer’s risk in approaching their story are often most resonant. And while we are open to work of all lengths, we prefer submissions of 5,000 words or less.
Please type and double-space your submission. We prefer .doc and .docx files, but .rtf, and Open Office files are okay, too. Please do not upload .pdf files. Please only send one submission at a time.
POETRY
Please submit 1 – 3 poems of up to a total of 10 pages in a single document. Submissions of more than 3 poems or 10 pages will not be read. We aim for a 3 month turn-around time; please do not submit again until hearing back on your first submission.
In lieu of a cover letter, include a bio of up to 100 words in the appropriate field, as well as any social media handles where indicated in the Submittable form.
By submitting you confirm that the work is your own and has not been previously published. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, please message us via Submittable immediately upon acceptance elsewhere.
If your work speaks to the knowledge or experience of a marginalized group, and you would like to contextualize your relationship to that group, you may do so within your cover letter.
At MAYDAY, we want to publish poems that teach us their language and how to read them. We seek to cultivate a poetry section that moves readers through the expressive and fresh–the weird yet intentional. We value subversive poems that engage critically with the world, that are specific yet embrace the mess of complexity. We want poems that make us laugh, poems that make us cry, and those that manage both. We enjoy poems that invite readers to connect with their speakers, and leave us transformed by the poet’s voice. We want poems that engage in or break received forms and those that create new ones. We’d love to see poetry that uses space imaginatively, including projective, concrete, visual, erasure, and documentary forms, as well as forms we haven’t seen yet! Show us what a poem can be and do. Send us your best.
Some poets we like or have been reading lately: Douglas Kearney, Don Mee Choi, Ilya Kaminsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Olivia Gatwood, Dionne Brand, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Ruefle, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Dolores Dorantes, Layli Long Soldier, Katie Condon, Mary Szybist, Peter Cole, John Keene, Mai Der Vang, Renee Gladman, Danez Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Wendy Xu, Leila Chatti, Chen Chen, Maggie Millner, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Adrienne Rich, Raúl Zurita, Paul Celan, and Mahmoud Darwish.
TRANSLATION
We are looking for pieces that deserve a broader audience, that excite and inspire, that honor cultural heritage and move in the liminal space between borders sketched on maps with shaky hands; pieces that encourage a reader to question and engage with the world around them. Poetry and prose from any language translated to English will be considered. Please include a brief translator’s note if you would like to provide context, artist bio, or other information important to the submitted piece.
The translator must have secured rights for the translations submitted, or the work must be in the public domain.
Please include both the original and the translated text in Word files. If the source text contains characters difficult for Word to present correctly, a PDF scan is fine.