Submission Guidelines

Submissions for the sixty-seventh volume will be accepted between July 15 and December 31 of 2023. View this year's Call for Submissions here.

Spectrum’s mission is to publish a spectrum of voices, perspectives, narratives, and forms. This includes those stories and voices which are underrepresented, including but not limited to those in the BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, immigrant, or international communities.

We accept fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art, but we don’t want you to feel limited to these definitions of genre. 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. We love surprises, as do our readers.

We are open to all genres and forms, including hybrid work. Spectrum has a legacy of publishing inventive, high-quality, and provocative work. Check out recent editions of Spectrum for examples of the work we like to publish. (link to recent copies of Spectrum).

Spectrum celebrates originality and at this time does not accept submissions generated by AI. 

Please submit prose and poetry in .doc or .docx formats.

Please submit art or hybrid work in a .doc or .docx when possible, with the highest quality or resolution.

All work must be previously unpublished.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 anonymously, so remove your name from all documents submitted to us. Pieces that violate our submission guidelines will not be considered for publication. We do ask that you fill out a positionality statement as a part of your submission. This space is used as an opportunity for a justification or disclaimer for content or voice in your piece. 

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.

POSITIONALITY STATEMENT (to be included in the google form):
In 100 words or less, please state how your identity as a writer or artist serves the content of this piece, if it speaks to a specific component of your identity or intersectionality. If there are any content warnings or reading notes, please provide them here.

FICTION/NONFICTION:
One piece per category, that does not exceed 5000 words. Please include the word count at the top of the first page.

POETRY:
Up to five poems. Please submit all poems in one document, each poem starting on a new page.

ART:
Up to five pieces of visual art, each submitted in a separate file in a single submission form.

HYBRID:
Up to three shorter pieces, or one long piece, not exceeding 5000 words or fifteen pages total. Please include the word count (if applicable) at the top of the first page.