Submission Guidelines

Submissions for the sixty-seventh volume will open July 1, 2023. 

Spectrum’s mission is to publish a spectrum of voices, perspectives, narratives, and forms.

We are open to all genres and forms, including hybrid work. Spectrum has a legacy of publishing of inventive, high-quality, and provocative work, and we’re striving to uphold that legacy and expand on it.

We accept fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art, but don't be limited by these genres. If it can be printed in two dimensions, we will consider it for publication. This includes sheet music, photography, collages, poems, essays, and stories with untraditional layouts, and much more. Surprise us and our readers.

Please submit prose and poetry in .doc or .docx formats. PDFs can cause formatting issues, especially for poetry.

All work must be previously unpublished. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but we ask that you inform us immediately if it is published elsewhere.

Please note that we read all of our submissions blind, so remove your name from all documents submitted to us. Pieces that violate our submission guidelines will not be considered for publication.

We accept submissions via our Google Forms only (links are in the blue box). Any submissions sent by email or by snail mail will not be read.

Copyright

Spectrum offers no monetary compensation but does give all contributors a free copy of the journal. We claim First North American Serial Rights, meaning that Spectrum will be the first to publish any content, but that in following publications, the rights revert to authors.