Erika Dreifus

Each week in this space, Practicing Writing shares no-fee, paying markets for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction: competitions, contests, and calls for submissions. These weekly posts complement monthly issues of The Practicing Writer newsletter, where you’ll always find more listings, none of them limiting eligibility to residents of a single municipality, state, or province. (But this blog does share those more localized opportunities, including jobs.)

As always, if you’d like to share a specific opportunity listed here, please credit the blog for the find. Thanks for respecting the time and effort that I put into researching, curating, and posting this information! I do notice, and I appreciate the courtesy.

• From The Drift: “Pitch us!! We like daring ideas, ambitious arguments, and longform cultural criticism more generally. The majority of pieces we publish start out as cold pitches, and we read and respond to every email we receive.” Payment: “generally $300-500 (depending on length, amount of research and reporting, etc.)”
• Poetry Online “is a poetry journal committed to publishing work made accessible to all….We offer an online venue to share poems alongside audio, captioned video, and screenreader accessible images, so every reader is included. We officially launch our venue on January 16, 2021. Submit now! We publish authors on a rolling, weekly basis. We have no strict poetry style or theme. We accept both poetry and visual poetry, traditional and experimental.” Pays: “$15 per poem, by Venmo or Paypal, after acceptance.” (Thanks to @Duotrope for leading me to this one.)
• All Female Menu, “a zine and community space for individuals who identify with a canonically-excluded gender,” invites submissions on the topic of “Memory”: “Send us poetry, prose, and hybrid works about personal, intergenerational, and embodied memory. Send us anything else that fits into your mental map of what memory is, does, and feels like. We want to read about your childhood fantasies and tragedies; your nostalgia for a feeling or a person; the physical and existential pain you carry from the matriarchs of your family; the description of an ennui-tinged visceral reminiscence. Send us: the dark recollections you’ve been nervous to commit to writing; the echo of that moment when the wind was knocked out of you; the romanticized rememberings self-aware enough to recognize their own fiction; the strange, flashbulbs you discovered later in life while meditating or tripping; the rosey retrospections you’ve let take over the tragic truths; the authentic, ugly secretions of your past that need a good literary home. We do not wish to limit the themes your work explores, but please read our first online issue, Present Moment, to have a better understanding of what we have published previously before sending us any work of your own.” Payment: “We can offer each writer $10 via PayPal upon publication.” Deadline: January 17.
• Flash Fiction Online is open for submissions until January 21. “We publish across many genres, including speculative (science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, and horror) and literary fiction.” Pays: “$80 per story for first electronic rights for original (previously unpublished) fiction, with 6 months exclusivity, as well as a non-exclusive one-time right to publish the stories in an anthology. The author retains all other rights. Original stories must not have been previously published anywhere, including a blog or on Patreon. Payment is made via PayPal (preferred) or mailed as a check.”
• Attention, South Carolinians (35 years old and older): The Alicia Conger Patterson Scholarship is intended to “encourage South Carolina individuals to pursue continuing education or to develop a creative endeavor in order to enhance a career in the arts or to change career direction.” Scholarship confers a grant of $500 to $1,000. Applications close February 1.
• The Luminarts Fellowship “includes programs in Visual Arts, Creative Writing, Classical Music, and Jazz. In order to be eligible to apply for the Fellowship Program applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, live or reside within 150 miles of the Chicago Loop, and be currently enrolled in, or graduated from, a degree program, conservatory, or other professional artist development program.” This fellowship program awards two $7,500 Luminarts Fellowships for excellence in creative writing “in the categories of prose and poetry, both  fiction and nonfiction.” The current application round closes February 5.
• “Penguin Random House has an exciting job opening for an Editorial Assistant for the following imprints: Viking, Penguin Books, Penguin Life, and Penguin Classics. The Assistant will provide administrative and editorial support to two Executive Editors and work on an impressive array of literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, translated literature, lifestyle/inspiration, and distinguished classic titles.” This job appears to be located in New York.
• Houston Baptist University (HBU) invites applications for an Assistant Professor of Writing (fiction or screenwriting) to begin August 2020. Note: “Successful candidates should also be able to clearly express how their Christian faith enriches, guides, and undergirds their understanding of creative art and storytelling, as well as be able to articulate a vision for the role of his or her discipline at HBU that is supportive of the Ten Pillars vision statement.” Houston Baptist University also seeks Adjunct Professors “to join the Department of Cinema, Media Arts, and Writing with expertise in Fiction and/or Poetry.”