At Scoundrel Time, we welcome submissions from writers and visual artists at all stages of their careers.
We are accepting Fiction and Poetry* submissions via Submittable. Please read the specific information in those categories before submitting.
We are also actively seeking Creative Nonfiction, Graphic Fiction/Nonfiction, Humor (including graphic—cartoons/comics), and Visual Art (e.g., photographs, video, painting, sculpture). For these categories, please query us at general@scoundreltime.com. If we would like to see the complete work, we will be in touch. As a general guide, most of the essays we accept are under 3,000 words.
There is no fee for submissions.
Please send only original, unpublished manuscripts. If a work has appeared on a personal website or blog, for our purposes, it has been published.
Response time for fiction and poetry is usually 12 weeks. Response time for queries for nonfiction, humor, and art is usually 4-6 weeks.
At this time, we are unable to pay contributors; we truly wish we could. We are an all-volunteer nonprofit 501(c)(3) and accept tax-deductible donations.
We are grateful for your work.
In a time when language is, more than ever, used to stereotype, to conceal, to dehumanize, fiction should be a way to shout back, a light in the darkness. We are looking for fiction that is honest and surprising, that can engage with the contemporary political situation in direct and indirect ways. We look for work that humanizes, that surprises, that uses humor, that is both traditional and plays with form. Length is up to 3000 words. Flash fiction and short shorts welcome, novel excerpts fine if self-contained.
Please read the General Submission Guidelines in addition, before submitting. We look forward to reading your work.
Poetry helps resist the tendency to package the world into too-easy, self-flattering, falsifying certainties. It can challenge us to re-think what we thought we knew. It can shout back—the times being what they are—and declaim, and stamp its angry feet, and present, in general, an “oppositional” aesthetic. But it might also simply strive for something honest and surprising, something that engages with the contemporary political and cultural situation in ways we hadn’t anticipated—without necessarily arriving at an answer or solution. Maybe a carefully observed moment of beauty, of humor, of attention, can be framed as its own act of resistance.
We are looking for poetry that opens up what it means to develop a new poetry of engagement. Ideally, we want our readers to hop up and down and say, “I didn’t know you could do that, in a poem.” Humor is welcome, since it can be a great way to get to serious matter. Above all, we are looking for an honest and accurate embrace of complexity and nuance—that, too, can be its own act of resistance.
We are open as to style, form and aesthetic. We like history. Anything that’s subversive, in the way that poetry can be, is what we’re all about. Mostly we want to be taken somewhere. Please do.
Please submit between 3 to 6 poems on a single document in MS Word, single-spaced, with your contact information--email is fine--on each page in the footer.
Please read the General Submission Guidelines in addition, before submitting. We look forward to reading your work.