Broad Street
There are presently no open calls for submissions.
Get your work on the Street!
Broad Street, a semi-annual, interdisciplinary print magazine of true stories, seeks beautifully crafted narratives and artwork that present the truth in a way that’s new and special to readers. We feature big names and new names. We love to discover fresh talent, and we give every piece in the magazine the kind of editorial attention you might expect from a trade publisher.
The submissions fee is $3.00, which helps offset Broad Street‘s costs for Submittable itself.
Please read this entire page before sending your work.
The Thematic Concept
Each issue runs through a new part of town, being loosely based on a theme that can be interpreted in several ways. Please visit our website, broadstreetonline.org, for current themes. Don’t be afraid to get creative in your approach to any theme; we appreciate the surprises that come from a fresh perspective. We will also assess the relevance of submissions to future themes but may not have determined the publication schedule for a particular future issue.
If you are submitting for a theme, identify it in the subject line and/or cover letter of your entry. You don’t have to explain how your work fits that theme; we like to let our minds roam too.
The Fine Print
Forms of Truth-Telling
Craft and story can come in many forms: fact-based reflective reporting, expansive memoir, lapidary poetry, a stirring photo essay, or a single visual image. No academic studies or pomposity, please. All other approaches to telling true tales are welcomed, including the experimental. We are particularly interested in cultural reflection; go ahead and write your “me-moir,” but please demonstrate that your personal experience has wider cultural significance.
Seeking the Unpublished
We prefer previously unpublished works, though we temporarily will be considering a limited number of published pieces; please explain in your cover letter where and when a piece appeared, whether online, in print, or in a gallery show. It is most likely to reach print with us if it first appeared in another country or a radically different form and we can give it a new audience. From time to time, previously published and appropriately credited work will find a niche on our website when it fits one of our themes.
Literary Artists: Requirements
We welcome your best work, ideally coming in under 6,000 words. Excerpts of larger works may be considered but must be presented so as to stand alone as individual pieces.
For prose, please double-space and use a legible 12-point font. We are eager to read both traditional creative nonfiction and experimental prose, so dare to use the approach that works for you—as long as it is truthful.
Researched essays (for example, “Making Friends with Midge,” the piece on Barbie, Midge, and friendship on our website and recipient of a Pushcart Special Mention) should come with endnotes explaining where you found your facts. We try to avoid publishing footnotes, but we fact-check everything that comes through. We’re sticklers that way.
Memoir should transcend delight in the personal in order to offer a sense of the universal, including (perhaps) cultural reflection and parallel narratives. Examples from our pages include Paisley Rekdal’s “Lives of Strangers,” an exploration of marriage and murder in Salt Lake City (a Pushcart Special Mention), and Ramsey Hootman’s “Chastity Belt Included.”
Poetry may come in single-spaced, with one poem per page. Please do not send more than five poems at once, unless there is a strong artistic reason (a haiku cycle, an experimental series).
We’re always looking for good interview subjects—in-depth conversations with people who tell stories in interesting and perhaps unexpected ways. See our interviews with literary megastar Jeanette Winterson and with Tony-winning costume designer Paloma Young (visible on the website). Query the editorial director (sbcokal@vcu.edu) about interviews before submitting.
Visual Artists: Needed
Visual art is a hugely important part of our print issue and our online presence. We feature a photo essay in every issue, and we put individual artworks in conversation with written pieces. If you are submitting an image, please upload it with a title; use png, jpg, or gif formats and low resolution (100-300 dpi). We will request a higher resolution rendition if accepted. If you have trouble with the upload, please contact the editor. Your cover letter may explain the image or photo essay; you may also want to write an introduction for the piece.
We are also interested in collaborations between artists of word and image.
Our Response Time
Broad Street’s staff is lean (but never mean), so please allow up to 120 days for a response. We aim to avoid those year-long waiting periods common at other journals. We are among the few, the brave, the dedicated, who read during summers.
Simultaneous Submissions?
Of course. We understand that it’s tough to wait for an answer from one magazine before submitting to another, so we do accept simultaneous submissions. We ask that if your piece is accepted elsewhere, you inform us immediately via Submittable (notes to the editors create more work for us hunting down your submission) … We’ll congratulate you and take your entry off our roster.
What Rights We Claim
If we accept your piece, we acquire first-time North American serial rights (unless your work is previously published, in which case we need to work out a different agreement). Upon publication, rights revert to the author or artist, who may reproduce it in other forms (books, magazines, etc.). We ask that you acknowledge Broad Street as the work’s first place of publication.
If we run special “best of” issues in future, we may contact you for the right to reprint. We might also feature small excerpts of your work on our website to promote the magazine; in some cases, we request the right to re-present your work in its entirety. Remember that our online features are great publicity for your body of work.
Payment
As with most literary magazines, Broad Street is unable to offer payment other than contributor’s copies. If we run your piece, we will send you four copies automatically, plus a copy of the issue following yours. You may order more for $4 each, roughly the price of postage.