Where to Publish Flash Nonfiction & Micro-Essays
LATEST LIST UPDATE: JULY 2023
As promised, I’ve compiled what I am calling here a guide to journals and magazines that publish flash nonfiction/micro-essays.
Before I present the list, I need to issue a few clarifications and caveats.
First, this list by no means includes *every* journal or magazine that might publish your piece of flash nonfiction. For the most part, I’ve omitted publications that specify only that submitted essays should run “no longer than” or “up to” 5,000 or 8,000 words. It’s entirely possible that the editors of these publications will welcome something more along the lines of 500 or 800 words. But unless I’ve discerned a *specific* editorial interest in shorter-form nonfiction–whether through my own research into guidelines and past issues or through sources listed at the end of the post–I haven’t included them here.
I’ve also had to break my usual blog-and-newsletter-rule about limiting listings to paying journals only (and only publications that don’t require reading fees). But I’ve done my best to signal to you which journals state outright on their sites that they’ll pay for your work–look for the $–and which ones are equally upfront about charging fees. As of 2022, I’ve removed listings for journals that appear to charge fees but don’t pay contributors.
Important note: Not every publication is open to submissions year-round, but I’m not tracking that information here.
Worth a mention: Just because a journal is listed here doesn’t mean that it’s an ideal home for your work. Check out these tried-and-true tips for deciding whether you wish to send your work to any particular venue.
Finally: If you know of a journal or magazine that’s specifically interested in flash nonfiction and micro-essays that should be added to the list, please share your knowledge (bonus points for links, too) in comments. Thank you!
Without further ado…
- *82 Review
- Abandon Journal ($)
- After Happy Hour ($)
- Alphabet Box ($)
- Apple in the Dark (Note: In August 2022, I was told of a “dangerous website” warning for this one; proceed with caution.)
- Baltimore Review ($)
- Barren
- Beaver Magazine
- Brevity ($; charges sub fee)
- Chestnut Review ($)
- (The) Christian Science Monitor’s “Home Forum” section ($)
- (The) Cincinnati Review’s miCRO feature ($)
- (The) Citron Review
- CRAFT ($)
- Electric Literature’s “The Commuter” ($)
- FEED
- Five Minutes
- (The) Forge Literary Magazine ($; fee-free subs until they reach monthly cap)
- (The) Fourth River’s “Tributaries” feature (journal for “nature and place-based writing.”)
- Glassworks (“There is no fee to submit through November 30 or for the first 1,000 submissions, whatever comes first. After that, a $2 submission fee will be required.”)
- (The) Good Life Review “Micro Monday” feature ($)
- Good River Review
- Gordon Square Review ($)
- Hippocampus ($; charges sub fee)
- Indiana Review ($; charges sub fee [waived for Black and/or Indigenous writers])
- Iō ($; charges sub fee)
- JMWW
- (The) Journal of Compressed Creative Arts ($)
- (The) Lindenwood Review
- (The) Maine Review ($, charges sub fee but holds fee-free sub periods that are announced on social media)
- MicroLit Almanac
- Miniskirt Magazine (“your destination for love and romance”)
- Molecule
- New Orleans Review ($; charges sub fee w/exceptions as noted in their guidelines)
- New South
- Newfound ($)
- Olit ($; “Strong preference for Orlando based writers/submissions about Orlando and surrounding areas.”)
- (The) Palisades Review
- Paranoid Tree ($)
- Porter House Review ($, charges sub fee)
- Prose Online ($, appears to have instituted a sub fee)
- River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” (charges sub fee, “but watch for free submission periods”)
- Rough Cut Press ($; featuring “experimental work…by writers from the LGBTQIA community”)
- Saint Katherine Review (“we do charge for work you’d like us to consider outside our current reading periods”)
- Salamander ($)
- Scrawl Place ($; “part visitor’s guide, part travelogue, part literary journal”)
- Smokelong Quarterly ($)
- Subtropics ($; charges submission fee
- Sundog Lit ($; has a free-submissions cap)
- Sweet
- (The) Sun’s “Readers Write” section
- Tahoma Literary Review ($; charges sub fee; “free submissions to authors and poets from historically marginalized groups” until a cap is reached)
- Trampset ($)
- Vast Chasm ($)
- Waxwing
- X-R-A-Y
Sources/Further Resources
- FlashFictionFlash (free online newsletter devoted to flash literature).
- “Flash Nonfiction: An Interview with Dinty Moore” (River Teeth blog).
- The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction edited by Zoë Boissiere and Dinty W. Moore (Rose Metal Press, 2020). I’m honored to have a piece included in this anthology (though I won’t earn a penny if you purchase the book, so that is not why I’m listing it!).
Thank you for this – great resource, and right at the time I was thinking about this very topic!
I’ve had flash nonfiction pieces published online with PANK and in print with Gargoyle.
There’s also the NY Times “Modern Love” column.
This is a great resource for Flash enthusiasts. Thanks for thinking of us at Flashquake. We’d love love love to be a paying market again, but for now, we issue a beautiful, multi-media PDF of the issue to all contributors.
Erika,
Thanks so much for this! I’ll add a few recommendations as well. The Boston Globe’s Perspective column and its Couplings space are both good venues to consider for creative nonfiction.
The Perspective word limit is typically 700-750 words. They take the piece based on a short pitch that typically includes the suggested top of the story. The Perspective space often wants something connected to a current event or at least a time hook. My “Jewish Mom’s Dilemma” piece worked simply because it had the Hanukkah/Christmas hook. It pays roughly $1/word. Coupling – very competitive like Modern Love – has a similar word length restriction, and as the title suggests, it must have to do with relationships. Coupling’s editor typically wants to see the whole piece before considering it. (Neither of these editors would use the term “flash non-fiction,” but the word lengths fit the bill.)
Linda
Ps. And of course, there’s always the super-competitive New York Times Lives column to consider as well. (850 words)
@Peggy: So glad–thank you for the comment.
@Cindy: Thanks for chiming in as an editor.
@Irene & @Linda: Thank you both for sharing your experiences and expertise. I’m going to revisit the opportunities you’ve mentioned, and if I can find links to guidelines and info about payment online, I’ll add them to the list (some I’d chosen not to link to because I didn’t immediately find that info available). (Is it my imagination, or has the Globe become increasingly possessive of its behind-the-paywall content? I miss it! Wish I could get credit for years of subscribing in the past!) In the meantime, I’m very glad that you have mentioned the additional venues in these comments for others to look into as they choose. Thank you again.
Erika,
Thanks for listing all the places to submit micro-essays. A friend and I just started a little online journal called ShortStoryNation.com. We accept all genres, but the stories need to be under 300 words.
Thanks again,
DTW
Thanks for the info, DTW, and good luck with the journal.
This is great. Thanks. BTW I had a piece of flash non fiction published in a journal called longshortstory.com. Also literarymama occassionally takes short pieces. Check them out too.
Carol, do you have a link to your piece on “longshortstory.com”? I can’t seem to find the site, your specifying “longshortstory.com” notwithstanding.
Hi Erika,
Just popped by to say thanks for featuring Zest on your list of ezines. How did you come across us? It’s very kind of you to have given a shout out.
I was reading the comments and thought I would reply to this as my very first online publication was through Longstoryshort, but they didn’t archive my story, just my details. 🙁 Thought you might like to know.
Cheers,
Kate
Hi, Kate:
Oh, I wish I could remember how/where I found ZEST. I’m just glad that I did!
Best,
Erika
matchbook (matchbooklitmag.com) publishes what we call “indeterminate prose” which more than includes flash nonfiction. We would love to read some!
Hi, Erika. Thank you, this is a handy list. Prime Number Magazine is also looking for flash nonfiction. In our updates between quarterly issues we publish flash fiction and non-fiction as well as shorter poems. Submission guidelines here: http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/Submit.html
What a great list–concise and useful. I’ve been pondering where to submit some of the personal essays that I write from my experiences as an amateur pianist, and it’s great to have this go-to list from such a reputable source.
I’m so glad that you think it’s useful, Nancy. Thanks for the comment.
Hi Erica,
I’m thrilled to find this – it’s a valuable resource that I will come to every time I finish a piece and want to find the best fit to submit it. Thanks so much for compiling this list.
Here’s one more that publishes creative nonfiction of fewer than 2000 words – Under the Gum Tree: http://underthegumtree.com/.
Thanks, Andrea!
You can also submit flash nonfiction and flash fiction to This Very Breath Literary Journal.
http://www.thisverybreath.com/
Thanks, Daniel. Good to know.
Thank you so much for this. Incredibly useful! Only Auchumpkee Creek and Postcard Press seem to be obsolete, just so you know.
Thank you so very much, Shyra. I’ve removed them, thanks to your note.
This list is great. Wanted to add that The Evansville Review also pubs flash cnf. They took a piece of mine this past year, and their contributors list is pretty impressive!
@Lisa, thank you–and thanks for linking to the guidelines (click her name, folks).
So helpful! I can’t thank you enough.
You’re welcome, Elizabeth!
The editors at Rum Punch Press love reading and publishing submissions of flash fiction and micro-fiction and micro-essays. Please send us your work!
http://www.rumpunchpress.com/submissions/
Thanks for sharing, Courtney!
Hi, Erika–
Thank you for mentioning Proximity here. I am one of the magazine’s editors, and we have received several submissions from writers who mentioned that they heard of us here. We appreciate the referral and love getting good flash nonfiction submissions! http://www.proximity.org/submissions
I’m thrilled to hear it!
Here’s a couple I don’t see listed above:
Ghost Proposal http://ghostproposal.com
Journal of Microliterature http://www.microliterature.org
Waxwing http://waxwingmag.org
Thanks so much, Heidi! I’ve added the last two on your list. The first one didn’t seem to have clear mention of micro-essays. (But its submission page seems to be closed for now, so that may have something to do with it.) In any case, people will be able to check it out from your comment. Thank you for including the links. Makes my life so much easier! 😉
Hi Erika,
We publish flash fiction as well as micro fiction and prose poetry.
We’re especially looking for creative non fiction stories and essays.
Here’s our Submit page: https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org/contact-submit
Never any fee to submit. We are mostly a non paying venue, but have begun paying an honorarium (semi-pro) for featured pieces in each issue as well as adding contests with cash prizes.
Thank you!
Vera
Vera, thank you so much for sharing!
Great list, Erika. BTW, Better Than Starbucks exists at https://www.betterthanstarbucks.org/), but the link in your post is busted. Thanks for your most helpful aggregation (what we dream of, right?).
Updated.
Hi, Erika,
This is a great list and particularly handy for me as I’m looking for more editors to interview on the Lit Mag Love Podcast. We have only had one journal on your list on the show—John Haggerty from The Forge was in my second episode—although we have had several other creative nonfiction editors, and a lot of conversation about the qualities of CNF, most recently with Lilly Dancyger of Narratively.
In an upcoming interview with editors of Split Lip Magazine they talked about their flash contests, so they could go on your list, too. (I realize you wrote this in 2012, and I can see it’s also still a popular post, so it would make a good addition.)
All the best,
Rachel
Thanks, Rachel! I did update the post in 2016, but it’s probably time (soon) for another update. I’m going to leave Split Lip off for the moment, simply because they don’t seem to specify a particular interest in flash NONFICTION, so far as I can tell, and that’s the focus of this list. Their flash focus seems to be all-fiction. But I like Split Lip a lot (and have a poem waiting for their ruling there, myself). If they discuss flash nonfiction in the upcoming interview with you, I hope that you’ll come back and share a link when it’s available. Thanks again.
Three years later, here is the link to our interview: https://rachelthompson.co/podcast/21/
Flash lyric essays & nonfiction, along with prose poems at Eastern Iowa Review.
Not sure if that’s year-round, but I happen to have this already scheduled to share in tomorrow’s “Markets & Jobs” now that they’ve open again. Thanks for adding here.
Thank you, Erika Dreifus, for this very useful resource!
Wish you all the best in everything.
You are welcome!
JMWW says they like flash CNF as well: https://jmww.submittable.com/submit
They are also one of the quickest turnarounds you will ever get
Thanks for this. Do you happen to know if they pay? Don’t see any mention on the Submittable page.
I don’t see anything about payment on their website, so I assume not.
Just FYI I noticed the listing you put up for JMWW actually says “JMMW,” although the link is correct. An easy mistake to make — I always think it is the other way too 🙂
Fixed!