While our standard practice involves soliciting a single artist to be featured in each issue, our 2024 Design Editor, Ernest Ohia, encourages submissions of innovative works that blend the visual power of graphic art with the narrative depth of prose. Feel free to submit one or two graphic prose essays for our upcoming issue, and we’ll review them for potential inclusion. When submitting for this category, please kindly use .jpg, .tiff, or .pdf formats. We publish all graphic writing in grayscale.

If you need a fee waiver for any reason, please feel more than free to reach out to us at feewaiver.bwr@gmail.com to request one. If you have any questions pertaining to the submission process, you can contact Ernest Ohia at design.bwr@gmail.com.

In today’s economy, writing creative nonfiction is risky, frisky business. At the BWR nonfiction desk this year, we’re seeking experimental work with high stakes, on and off the page. Out: neat/tidy braids; linear thinking; making concessions; colonial structures and forms. In: hot takes &flyaways; literary messiness; RAGE; the erotics of doom. Rip a page out of your diary. Screenshot your texts. Reconstruct receipts. Tell the truth—just tell it slant ;)

A note: we are very open to submissions of all kinds, from writers of all races, nationalities, cultures, sexual orientations, and classes; that said, we are especially welcoming of work with themes of BIPOC, queer, disabled, non-Western, and/or class struggle & liberation.

Submit 1 work of “creative nonfiction” up to 5,000 words, or up to 2 flash pieces (1000 words or less for each).

BWR seeks to publish poems that make us sit back and think, Wait, what even is a poem? We want poems that make the strange feel natural, and the natural feel strange. Poems that showcase underrepresented voices and contemporary issues; that dismantle conventional ways of understanding the world. We want your pop culture obsessed poems and your folktale inspired poems and your so-silly-it's-serious poems. We want your poems that revel in kitsch and in play and in wonder; that recognize the subversive power of joy. 

Submit up to 3 poems with a maximum of 10 pages in one document. Please include a short cover letter and a 3rd-person bio.

For BWR fiction, we are looking for stories that are very aware of the worlds outside of here. Here could mean the physical space of a country or this physical plane of existence. We just want to get out of these small, contained spaces for a bit. There are many excuses to become insulated, but stories should never be a space for the insular. 

So we want stories of the spirits and the magic, the international and the extraterrestrial; really we just want writers to think about other worlds and other lives and other realities and other belief systems that would be considered atypical of the traditional Western literary imagination.  

We welcome stories from all sources, from writers of all races, all cultures and nationalities, all sexual orientations and gender identities, and themes that navigate these complexities. 

Send a single piece of fiction up to 6,000 words, or up to 2 pieces of flash (1000 words or less for each).

Black Warrior Review exists in part because of your continued and generous support. Your donations here are applied directly to our endowment, which supports contributor and artist payments.

Please note that a donation through this portal will not be tax deductible. If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to BWR, please visit this link. For submitting work to BWR, please see our other forms. This is not a portal to submit your work to BWR. 

To show our gratitude for your gift at the patron ($50) and guarantor ($100+) levels, you will receive a one-year subscription and recognition in upcoming issues of BWR.