As the month quickly comes to a close, check out these upcoming submission deadlines for fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and more:
Tahoma Literary Review – Oct. 31, 2025
Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
Indiana Review – October 31, 2025
Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
The Hopkins Review – October 31, 2025
Creative Nonfiction/Personal Essay
Fiction
Poetry
Critical Writing
FICTION – October 31, 2025
Literary and Experimental Fiction
Translations
The Hope Prize – October 31, 2025
Global Writer’s Prize – Short Story Competition
Michigan Quarterly Review – November 1, 2025
General Submissions in Prose and Poetry
2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize – November 30, 2025
2025 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize – November 30, 2025
Seneca Review – November 1, 2025
Essays
Beyond Category
Poetry
Ninth Letter (Web Version) – November 1, 2025
Theme: Performance
The theme for this issue is performance. To perform is to, for some audience, create the illusion that reality is this, rather than that. We do this everywhere–our social (and social media) lives, our dress, our relationships, our feelings, our genders, all performed in their ways; all around us there is the low hum of wishful artifice imparting an intended impression onto seen and unseen—perhaps even imaginary–spectators. Taken to its logical conclusion, a reasonable, if cynical, truth emerges: performance, in our day-to-day, is so essential, so inextricable from our quote-unquote “authentic selves,” that perhaps the authentic self is simply the sum of a lifetime of performances–that the show has somehow become its own type of truth. In professional wrestling, the word for this is “kayfabe”–the unspoken agreement that not only is the show inextricable from reality, but that, in essence, the performance is the reality. Or is it? How do we perform, and for whom? Send us your work!
Fiction
Poetry
Creative Nonfiction
Ploughshares – November 15, 2025
Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
The Idaho Review – November 15, 2025
Short stories
Creative nonfiction
Poetry
