Address submissions to Editor Christina Arbogast:
Kingdom: Animalia. Familiars. Daemons. Protectors. Companions. Predators. Prey. This is a space to submit art & writing about animals real or imagined, pre-historic or future, spineless or silky, friend or foe.
Share the work you do with animals; show us the bioluminescent creatures in your lagoon; describe the dreams where your lost pets come to visit you.
Highlight conservation work in your habitats. Profile the service animal of the year. Recount the folk tales that made you scared of drain serpents. Tell us about the anteater in the forest, the sandhill cranes in the parking lot, the carabao in the rice field, the angler in the deep.
We want your venom, oily feathers, plush fur, mythical beasts, and whale songs.
Please submit a maximum of 3 artworks, 3-5 pages for poems, and 10-15 pages for longer pieces.
See past work in this category here.
Address submissions to Poetry Editor Rita Mookerjee:
Send us three to five unpublished pieces at a time. We’ve got big appetites, so more is more. We want the poems that were too weird for workshop. Give us work that is eclectic and absurd and demands to be read aloud. Send us your jigsaw edges and remixes.
Address Sex + submissions to Editor Penda Smith:
Audre Lorde once said, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
We want those strong, strange, complicated feelings of desire, pleasure, longing, and chaos. We know that pleasure work, sex, and kink work are complicated for those of us who live within the margins of society. For those of us who have had to live in doorways, basements, and hallways, for those of who have had to create underworlds for us to express ourselves and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
We know that pleasure is an act of resistance to colonialism and systematic oppression, so tell us, what sends a shock of pleasure through your body? Who or what makes your toes curl in excitement or surrender? Is there a difference between surrendering and pleasure?
Crack open your heart, nightstand, and look underneath your bed– what stories, poems, hybrid, visual, and media work lies there throbbing waiting to explode with pleasure and chaos?
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Address Food and Beverage submissions to Editor in Chief Dorothy Chan:
Roll call: Amuse-Bouches, Cocktails, Dim Sum Happy Hour, Platters and Platters of Desserts, Endless Seafood, Fast Food, Buffets, and Feasts.
One night I was thinking, why not create a whole new category since food can be such joy, culture, sexuality, and everything, all at once? Think recipe poems, collage poems that include family recipes, essays about dream meals, photo essays about what's happening in the kitchen, craft pieces about how food is linked to the writing process, etc.
See past work in this category here.
Address Valentines submissions to Editor Eugenia Leigh:
We want to showcase every expression of love. Self-love, platonic love, familial love, lost love, lovey-dovey love, love for a planet, a pain, a pet, a pill. Most of all, we want Valentines to be a celebratory space for everyone—our LGBTQIAP+ community, especially our non-binary and trans loves, our BIPOC community, our disabled community, anyone fighting to love someone or to love yourself.
What we love: the weird, the quirky, the non-poemy poems. Send us your phone notes, your doodles, your unsent DMs. Tell us about the friend you didn’t know you were in love with until you came out. The love you still have for an ex’s mom. The love you loved in another universe. The love you lost in this one.
How we love it: sure, love poems win our hearts, but love comes in all forms! Is your Valentine a top 10 list? Is it a missing sign with pull tabs? Is it a scan, a photo, a screenshot? A graph, an obituary, a game? We want your playlists, your selfies, your loose leafs, your art. We want those self-affirming sticky notes on your bathroom mirror.
For inspiration, come fall in love with Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed’s MuslimVDay Cards and Shayla Lawz’s collage, “I become your language to reach your universe.” And see other past Valentines here. Give us your cutesy, your sultry, your badass most heartrending expressions of desire. Make us believe in love again.
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Address Hybrid submissions to Editor Stephanie Tom:
We want to see your work that blurs the boundaries between genres, that remixes and redefines categorical borders, and that comes to life at the intersection of the senses.
We welcome excerpts and standalone work that may include (but are not limited to!) photo essays and paintings, audiovisual poetry, comics and collages, video essays, lists and letters, metaphorical recipes, zines and dreams, annotated songs and speculative designs. Send us work that speaks to your archived lives, your present loves, and your hopes for the future. We love the eccentric, the experimental, and the ephemeral.
Send enough work to contextualize your project with respect for our time (10 pages or less). We are particularly interested in submissions from BIPOC writers / artists, as well as members of the LGBTQIAAP+ community.
See past works in this category here.
Address Essays submissions to Editor Aja St. Germaine:
Honey Literary’s essay section strives to overcome white-centered essay innards and overhaul stuffy heteronormative infrastructure. Let us listen to intuitive knowledge held by QTPOC bodies and lavish in it, let us carve space for our joy.
Essays demand exploration and reevaluation both internally and externally: a rewriting of history, literary canon, anything awaiting reconciliation and reclamation. Honey is hungry for intimately researched essays that break stylistic boundaries, mix medias, and queer the rules. We crave essays with elements of the poetic and the vulnerable, with liminality and hybridity ready to be consumed. We want some campy queer aestheticism to shake us to the core.
Send us your most investigational and experimental, well-researched and impermeable works.
Please check out previous Essays published in Honey Literary for a taste of what we like. ______________________________________________________________
Address Rants and Raves submissions to Editor Nabila Lovelace:
Send us what you are excited about. Rants & Raves is looking for critical & contextual works on books, just as we did before, but also we are expanding on that option! We are in search of pieces that meditate on works that bring out particular passions for you!
Is there a single poem that you would like to blare through a megaphone at all the strangers & loved ones in your community if given a chance? Is there a single song that you can’t get out your head & wish you could talk about with every car that speeds by? Is there a train that you hear daily & absolutely wish didn’t wake you up everyday? Is there a bird you witness in flight that transports you elsewhere? This is where those individual moments that move you shine.
We’re looking for (800 words or less) insights into moments that particularly move you. Is there one instance of an Allen Iverson crossover that you’re still hung up on? Which frame in the Rihanna “Work” video do you still have as a gif in your notes app? What about that one daffodil creeping into sprout on your sidewalk cracks? We’re open for you!
Address Interviews submissions to Editor Diamond Forde:
Honey Literary seeks to conduct and read interviews that demonstrate care, precision, and commitment to the artist. We want interviews that read past the empty banality of “raw” often ascribed to queer and BIPOC work, for interviews that celebrate and communicate with the artist on terms of their own complexities, their contradictions, their joys as well as their sorrows.
We prioritize work that reaches beyond the rote back-and-forth of traditional interview formats and instead engages on equal footing between interviewer and interviewee—work that embodies the kind of harmonies sung between two artists in love with the work they do, with the work they witness.
We want interviews that reach into and beyond the literary; so if you are a writer, but also a singer, a visual artist, a culinary chef, or filmmaker, Honey Literary hopes to share the motivations and obsessions motivating your act of creation.
Interview pitches and complete interviews can be sent directly here.
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Address Sticky Fingers submissions to Editor Jessica Nirvana Ram:
Think about the way the universe expands, that there is no one way to look at it, that you can always shift your perspective, discover something by looking at it upside down, mirrored, split down the middle. That's what we're looking for. Sticky Fingers accepts a little bit of everything: poems, short stories, essays, interviews, book reviews, features that captivate, that spotlight historically marginalized populations, and maybe something uncategorizable — surprise us. Are you a debuting author looking to place those last few poems somewhere before release day? Is your favorite author debuting a collection, is someone you admire making magic that's going unnoticed? Do you have an idea that you can't seem to place anywhere else? Are you having a hard time getting word out about your book? We might be the place for you. Give us your messy, thoughtful, electric inner workings — we want to know what YOU think is immediate right now in the literary world, let us help you give it wings.