submissions are closed!
Please read these guidelines carefully!
Lamp Lit publishes quarterly at the moment, though we would love to publish more frequently, and hope to do so as we pick up steam. We are looking for work we love, and that expands the capacity of our hearts. If you like, you can read our previous issues to see what we’ve chosen in the past, but we also eagerly look forward to reading work that looks nothing like what we’ve published before.
Submitting to Lamp Lit is free and we don’t have plans to change that. We accept submissions of poetry, flash fiction, personal essays, short stories of any genre and cover/other art for our issues.
We accept previously uncurated work, meaning that if you published it on your own website or social media in the past, that’s fine, but please do not submit work that has been accepted or published by another journal.
We also accept simultaneous submissions, but do tell us if your submission is being submitted elsewhere, so we can jump on your pieces if we love them. Please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere, and accept our hearty felicitations! If we do accept your work, please withdraw the piece from consideration by other publications.
We reserve first serial publishing rights, and the right to reprint or use quotes or excerpts for promotional use. All other rights revert back to you on publication.
We do not, at this time, pay contributors — this is a labor of love.
We will nominate for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
We do not accept submissions that denigrate other people of any description on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, religion or ability. Please do not send us anything gross. Submissions of this kind will be summarily deleted without response.
We do not accept work produced by AI. Please do not send any to us. Let’s not outsource our creativity to our tech bro overlords.
Submissions are accepted via email only at lampliteditors@gmail.com.
Find us, or track your submissions on Chill Subs.
A cover letter is nice and we do hope you will say hello when you submit, but please don’t stress about it. What we really need is your short, third person bio and the titles of your pieces in the body of your email (separated by commas, please, not bullet points). Without a bio, your submission is incomplete. There’s no need to get fancy, just tell us who you are and where to find your work/socials so we can big it up when we publish.
You will receive a response from us within 3 months of your submission, and very likely much sooner. If you have not heard from us within three months, please feel free to request an update, and please keep it to the same email chain, that way everything is together, nice and tidy, and we won’t lose our minds searching the inbox.
Poetry
3-5 poems, meaning at least 3 and no more than 5 poems per submission. There are no limitations on form or length, but poems with very long lines sometimes won’t fit the format of our issues, and very long poems will have to really knock us right out to be considered.
Please submit your work in an attached word .doc or similar. If the format requires .pdf, we can accept that as well, but a .doc is strongly preferred. We will not open file shares or google docs.
Start each poem on a new page, and put your name in the footer of your .doc.
Title your document “Poetry_Your First Name_Last Name” and Copy and paste the same title into the subject line of your email to us.
Please include the titles of your pieces (separated by commas, please, not bullet points) and a short, third person bio (max 100 words) in the body of your email. We’re not looking for your accolades, just tell us something about who you are, and where our readers can find you.
Fiction & other prose
Flash fiction: no more than 3 stories per submission, 1000 words or less per piece.
Short stories: no more than three stories per submission, 6000 words or less per piece.
Creative non-fiction: one personal essay per submission, 6000 word or less.
Other writing is welcome too, as long as it stands on its own as a complete piece and is no more than 6000 words.
Please submit your work in an attached word .doc or similar. We will not open file shares or google docs.
Start each story on a new page, and put your name in the footer.
Title your document “Flash Fiction_First Name_Last Name” or “Short Stories_First Name_Last Name”, or Personal Essay_First Name_Last Name” or “Other_FirstName_LastName”. Copy and paste the same title into the subject line of your email to us.
Please include a short, third person bio (max 100 words) in the body of your email, along with the titles of your pieces (separated by commas, please, not bullet points). We’re not looking for your accolades, just tell us something about who you are, and where our readers can find you and your work.
Cover Art & Illustration
Submit 3-5 photos, drawings, paintings, comics or digital artwork as individual high-quality JPEG files.
AI will not be considered.
Color images (especially, though not exclusively) will be considered for our cover art.
Title your attachments “Art_First Name_Last Name”, and put the same title as the subject line of your email to us.
Please include a short, third person bio in the body of your email, along with the titles of your pieces (separated by commas, please, not bullet points) and some information about the medium of each one. We are not looking for your accolades, just tell us something about who you are, and where our readers can find you and your work.
We aim to respond to all work within 3 months of the date of submission, and usually respond sooner, but please to bear in mind that there are exactly two humans behind this whole project. If we fail respond in a timely fashion, please do feel free to write to us and ask for an update by replying to the same email thread as your submission. This will help keep our inboxes neat and help us reply to you as quickly as possible.
Dear creators, thank you for your interest in submitting to Lamp Lit. We can’t wait to read/see your work!
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