SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES

At MORIA, we believe words have and always will have power. We want to encounter writing that makes people think; poetry and story and memoir that generate questions; ideas and obsessions that spark hearts as well as break them.

While we accept all styles — including experimental, hybrid, and conventional forms — we aren’t interested in submissions of light verse, genre fiction, and any piece that references gratuitous violence, exploitative sexual imagery or is racist, misogynist, sexist, homophobic, fat-phobic, and the like. We’re committed to publishing a diverse range of poets and writers. Across a range of our recent issues, more than half of our authors have been women, a third have been people of color, and more than a tenth have been writers who identify as LGBTQIA+. We’ve also published pieces from writers ranging from 15 to 97 years of age, which we think is very cool and important but doesn’t happen as often as it should in the world of literary zines and journals.

We welcome work from traditionally under-represented groups, including writers who identify as women, indigenous, writers of color, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, poor, border-straddling, disabled, or of various religious beliefs and unbeliefs.

We ask that you adhere to the following set of guidelines when presenting your work for submission to MORIA:

  • send up to a total of five poems; or one piece of fiction of 1,500 words or less; or one piece of creative non-fiction of 1,500 words or less;

  • gather poems together in a single document for submission;

  • send only work that is previously unpublished, including on personal blog sites;

  • submissions cannot be created through generative AI models, like ChatGPT or Microsoft Bing AI, and must be 100% human-made;

  • include a cover letter in the body of the email that makes note of the title(s) of the work and offers a brief bio, written in the conventional third-person style;

  • note in your cover letter whether the work you are sending is a simultaneous submission (we accept circulating manuscripts but ask that you inform us via Submittable as soon as possible if any of your submitted pieces are accepted elsewhere or email us at submissions@moriaonline.com. Please don’t use this address for submissions themselves; they will not be read or considered);

  • make sure poetry is single-spaced (unless the form demands otherwise) and prose is double-spaced; arrange only one poem per page;

  • we accept the following file formats for your attachments: Word doc and docx; please do not send a pdf;

  • we obtain nonexclusive English world rights for digital publication and maintain an archive of previous Issues; that means rights to the piece(s) revert back to the author upon publication;

  • we nominate our poets and writers for various awards, including the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets;

  • we do not accept work from faculty, staff, current students, or alumni of Woodbury University who have graduated in the last three years;

  • if we have published your work in one of our issues, kindly wait a year (skip an issue) before submitting to us again;

  • please only submit ONCE during any given open submissions window (this includes all genres—if you write in more than one genre, choose only one to submit per open window); you can resubmit something else for the following issue should your work not be accepted;

  • please submit work to our Submittable page only (BUTTON BELOW); we no longer accept submissions by email or read anonymously;

  • if you need to withdraw a poem or a story or an essay from consideration (for instance, because it’s been accepted elsewhere), please do so via Submittable by adding a message onto the message thread — button to access our site is below;

  • finally, we sometimes (albeit rarely) make acceptance of a piece for publication contingent on the author undertaking developmental edits to the substance of the piece (as opposed to copyedits), when the work is straddling the line between acceptance and rejection or when the piece is otherwise quite strong, but has an isolated area of concern to the editors — in other words, something that’s identifiable about the piece doesn’t sit right just yet. These edits are offered in the spirit of collaboration between author and editor (as all good editorial relationships should be) and as a way of making the writing stronger. We always discuss these substantive edits with the author before making changes for publication. However, when it comes to copyedits (that is, the polishing of a piece without making substantive changes), we reserve the right to do so without consultation. This involves adhering to our house rules regarding standard grammar, syntax, American English spellings and usage, parallelism, punctuation, consistent verb tense, the elimination of typos, and such, with full awareness that more experimental pieces are meant to break these boxes. We proceed with a light hand and in recognition that our shared goal is to make the piece stronger for a reader and to save a writer from errors on the published page. If an author does not feel that they would be able to engage in such an editorial relationship, they should refrain from submitting their work to MORIA.

  • SUBMISSIONS FOR ISSUE 15 will open in mid-January.