Fall 2026 Digital Chapbook Contest

From October 8th to December 1st, we will be accepting chapbook collections of 15-20 pages (not including front or back matter) in all genres. Two winners will be selected by the BWR editors, and each winner will be awarded a $500 prize along with publication of their chapbook on the BWR website. Along with the two winners, two submissions will be specially noted as honorable mentions. 

Essays, stories, poems, and any other form of hybrid writing that takes risks and experiments with form & content are welcome. BWR is named after the Black Warrior River, a name honoring Chief Tuskaloosa, a paramount chief of the Mississippi nations. Like the river, our journal is constantly changing & deeply resilient. We are the longest-running journal helmed by graduate students in the United States, running continuously since 1974. While we’re based in Alabama and pride ourselves on featuring local writers and artists alongside Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, we have serious international reach and are often considered on the forefront of experimental, fabulist, and all-around “weird” literature and a home for marginalized voices. We believe in pushing boundaries, fostering innovation, and amplifying voices often unheard in traditional literary spaces.

Our Submission Guidelines

Upload your submission as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf.

In your submission, please include a title page, table of contents, and page numbers. While individual pieces in the manuscript may be published elsewhere, the manuscript must be unpublished as a whole. Submissions must include an acknowledgements page for any previously published work, if applicable. These pages do not count towards the 15-20 page limit for submissions. 

Authors have the option to include cover art in their submissions, though this does not guarantee any submitted art will be used; otherwise, BWR will provide cover art for the winning chapbooks. 

Winners and honorable mentions will be informed in early 2027, and we will announce the winners & honorable mentions publicly in February 2027. We accept, and encourage, simultaneous submissions and only ask that you withdraw your piece(s) upon acceptance elsewhere. 

Individual pieces from chapbook submissions may be considered for BWR publication as general submissions for issue 54.1—at editor discretion—provided they are not published elsewhere. 

No AI Submissions

We currently do not accept work from artificial intelligence (“AI”) generators or similar. By submitting your entry here, you are attesting that your work was not created, in whole or in part, with an AI generator or similar.

We are excited to announce our second ever Hybrid Contest judged by Brenna Womer!

For this contest, BWR seeks work that explodes, refuses, and deconstructs the boundaries of genre altogether.

We want work interested in what becomes possible when we dissolve the conventions and constraints of genre in favor of work informed by a multitude of disciplines, practices, and knowledges. Work that utilizes hybridity to engage with how genre itself is frequently both a product and a tool of capital-colonial powers and institutions, work that moves between and across and beyond genre as an active act of resistance and refusal.

In particular, we encourage work in conversation with writing/arts practices that have long been defying and working outside of singular genre categories—artmaking traditions and histories that are frequently delegitimized and dismissed by Western literary canon constructions of genre.

Send us your work that is genre-interdisciplinary, genre-multimodal, genre-expansive, genre-denying, genre-exploding, genre-transcendent, genre-undoing.

Winning entries will be published online, so send your formal weirdness that cannot be published in print: photos, color, multimedia writing wonders, and more. 

Submission Guidelines:

• All submissions must be unpublished (online or print). Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us if accepted elsewhere.
• The winner will receive a cash prize of $300, online publication in the BWR website, and notation in issue 53.2. 
• The runner-up will receive $100, online publication, and notation in issue 53.2.
• Finalists will receive notation in issue 53.2 and are considered for general publication.
• The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2026.

Additional Information:

• We welcome international submissions.
• Our commitment to diversity is reflected in both the writers we support and the stories we publish.
• AI-generated work is not accepted.  

Guest Judge: Brenna Womer

Brenna Womer (she/they) is a neurodivergent prose writer, poet, editor, and visual artist. She's a professor at California State University, Fresno, where she teaches creative nonfiction and hybridity in the MFA program. She also teaches literature at the nearby men's and women's prisons in Chowchilla. She’s the author of the full-length, hybrid collections Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) as well as the chapbooks Dear Mom (petrichor editions, 2026). cost of living (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, North American Review, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She lives in Fresno with three rescue pups—two pitbulls and a chihuahua—in a little house where she makes stained glass on the dining room floor. She is proudly AuDHD, queer, Latine, sober, and childfree.

Black Warrior Review is deeply grateful for your generosity. Donations help sustain our magazine and support our contributors and artists. Please note:

• Donations made through this portal are not tax-deductible.
• To make a tax-deductible donation, you can contact the Office of Student Media when they reopen in mid-January 2025.

This portal is for donations only. To submit work to BWR, please visit our submissions page.

Thank you for supporting BWR and our literary community!