We seek art, comics, and visual narratives of all forms that are as engaged as they are engaging. We want your work that refuses to look away from the moment we are publishing into right now, work that witnesses, that reconfigures, that radically reimagines what is and what might be. We accept submissions of single or multiple works that all together total no more than six pages, though due to our print format space is limited, and we are only able to print in greyscale at this time. We also encourage submissions of work that is multidimensional and/or not primarily page-based—textiles, collages, sculptures, blueprints, installations, and more are all actively encouraged, and we are happy to accept photographed submissions as needed. If it can exist on the space of the page in any form, feel free to send it (or to email design.bwr@gmail.com if you have questions!)

BWR wants your stories about the other. Give us your otherized, your ostracized, your characters demarcated by exclusion. Defamiliarize our routine. Show us your aliens and your alienated, your tales of non-conformity, your dispatches from beyond the confines of both time and space. We want your overlooked perspectives, told from the brinks of belonging. We will accept stories of up to 6,000 words, but please keep in mind we are a print journal with limited physical space.

While this call seeks submissions that confront this theme on the levels of plot or character, we emphatically encourage submissions from authors who themselves have been otherized. Whether through intentional marginalization or exclusionary tastes in genre or form, literary institutions have always amplified certain voices over others, and BWR is committed to publishing authors, stories, and forms not traditionally represented in literary circles.

We believe poetry is spiritual. We believe poetry is history. It evokes the emotional and physical spaces we have traveled before, and the possibilities of the future and the pangs in the present. Poetry is the history of words; poetry reminds us how much has happened and how much has changed.

We are interested in poems that explore the history of things and place, poems that interrogate the personal and how the colonial and postcolonial histories are embedded in the body, the tongue, the tree, the cushion, the roof, and the land and by history, what has changed through this history and what is their influence in the present.

The lands in Congo, Palestine, Sudan, the hibakujumoku trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing, the lands in Delta State, Nigeria, The lovers of Modena, and language itself. What has changed and what has remained without change?

We are interested in poems that explore personal history, poems that explore dysfunction through the little things, poems that explore BIPOC spaces. That old chair in your mother’s room, the crack on the mug, and the dust on the note.

We are interested in experimental poems that dissect the normal, poems that explore illness, memory loss and ordinary life.

For BWR, don’t self-reject, send it our way!

Nonfiction can, and should be, uncertain of itself. We should be wary of anything that claims it knows the truth, the whole truth, the capital T “Truth.”

We want alternate versions of the story. The one you believe, the one that’s true, the one you want to be true. How your beloved’s tell the story differently—or how they would tell it differently. We want your speculation, your “maybe”s, your “absolutely”s, your “never”s, and we want them all with a grain of salt. We want to know where your memory fails, where you believe it’s unequivocally correct, where you have room for multiple realities. Most importantly, we want to know why you believe what you believe, why you don’t want to, why you can’t. 

We want to know the truths and lies you tell yourself and the ones the world has told you. Western science, medicine, and history have used their versions of the capital T “Truth” to control and silence people for centuries. We want work that examines how these lies came to be, how they continue to scapegoat and divide us. In a world where marginalized histories are erased from textbooks and unfounded science is promoted by our government to further disenfranchise and erase us, confront these lies and tell us the truth. Call them out. 

Bring us your messy truths, your unabashed lies, your I-don’t-know’s, and everything in between. Make us question reality. While we would love to publish your longer work, we only have so much space in our journal, so please limit your submissions to 4000 words.

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. If you’ve ever squinted at a piece and thought, where do I even send this, what genre even is this? Send it here!

We accept submissions of up to 10 pages, though please note that due to our print format, space is limited. In addition, at this time we are only able to publish hybrid pieces in black and white.

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!