What Changes & What Stays the Same

Submissions for our DREAM issue open on February 15, and we can’t wait to read what you send us!

We also wanted to let you know this will be our last paid submission opportunity for the foreseeable future. Independent online literary magazines are a labor of love, and financing them often falls to one person. In 2020, we decided to pay contributors for as long as it was feasible, and it’s just not feasible anymore.

We value our contributors, volunteers, and readers and will continue offering free and pay-what-you-can workshops, nominating eligible works for awards, and promoting community members on social media and at launch events.

Longleaf has always been about community, and that won’t change. Thank you for being part of our community.

In addition to changes to payment, we have also changed our submission guidelines as follows: If you’re submitting poetry, please submit 1 to 3 poems. If you’re submitting CNF or fiction, please submit 1 piece up to 5,000 words OR 3 micros (<500 words). This is so that our reading team can give your best work the attention it deserves.

We also recognize that the literary world is not always a safe space, and we want to do our part to make it so. As such, please include your pronouns and any relevant content warnings on the first page of your submission. We are also committed to amplifying #OwnVoices and decolonizing our literary space, so if your work centers a marginalized group, please include an identity statement on the first page of your submission, explaining your connection to that group.

Finally, our policy is to accept only previously unpublished work. However, literary journals sometimes break their trust with the literary community and leave authors in the lurch. Therefore, if you have pulled work from a publication due to harassment or bigotry, or if your work has been previously published without your full informed consent by a predatory press and has since been removed, we will consider it. Please just make a note on the first page of your submission regarding its publication history.

If you have any questions, never hesitate to ask! You can get in touch at [email protected].

Thanks, as always, for being wonderful you. Keep writing (even if the writing today looks like bundling up in blankets or taking a hike), and take care!