General Submissions Open Soon!
Grist Editors
July 27, 2026
Grist will open for submissions to its landmark twentieth issue on August 1, 2026. Due to the vagaries of lit-mag publishing, though, we will be trying out a new system. Why? Well, because Grist has grown in its first twenty issues (thank you all!), we have had to deal with an ever-increasing number of submissions each year. Broadly, this is great news. We are inundated with superb work from you all. But given challenges on the funding front, and with only a volunteer staff of University of Tennessee students, there is a limit to the submissions we can handle, if we want to do your work justice.
This means that we are for the first time trialing submission caps in our text genres; fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Visual art submissions will remain uncapped (and we would love to see more of them, so please tell your artist friends!). We will be capping both fiction and poetry at 500 submissions, and creative non-fiction to 150. We hope this provides the best balance possible between still creating opportunities for the writing community to submit its work, whilst granting the Grist team more time to read and edit it with the care it deserves. To afford these changes, we will unfortunately have to raise our submission fee this year to $4. Subscribers will continue to enjoy free and uncapped submissions.
Grist recognises, however, that there are readers around the world operating on a fixed or low income. We still want to give you a chance to submit your work. So, we will open submissions first on August 1 for a fee-free submission day (between 12:00am and 11:59pm eastern). These submissions will be capped to thirty submissions each in fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, plus ten free submissions in visual art, for a total of 100 free submissions. General submissions will then open fully on August 2, and run until caps are reached, or until October 31, if they are not reached.
Please, if you can afford the submission fee, consider leaving the fee-free submission slots open to those less able to do so.
We recognize this system might not please everyone. Simply put, though, the survival of Grist depends on us making a change. We are open to trying different options in future, as we search for ways to make Grist a sustainable endeavour for all involved.
Thank you for your continued support. We cannot wait to read your work, and look forward to doing so with even greater attention. For more on our submission guidelines, see https://gristjournal.com/submit/.
