What We’re Looking For
Submission Guidelines
The Woodward Review accepts poetry, prose, hybrid and digital media from January 1 – March 1 and September 1 – November 1. If you’re able, please send work through Submittable at wlr.submittable.com/submit. Submissions of reviews & responses are welcome during the summer months, for readers and prior contributors to reflect upon anything highlighted by the Review; these may be written in any genre or medium. If Submittable presents an accessibility barrier, send your work to woodwardreview@wayne.edu, under the subject line [Category] Submission. The Woodward Review is a paying market, commensurate with our funding for each submissions window; for volume 2 issue 2, we’re able to pay $50 per contributor. All submissions are free.
General
We’re looking for work from new and established writers and artists, but only if it’s previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are great, but please (please!) let us know if your submission gets accepted elsewhere (if it’s just one piece from a submission set, let us know that, too). Written submissions should be sent as a doc, docx, or pdf, while hybrid and digital submissions can be in any file type you think we can access without additional software.
Include a short cover letter & bio in the body of your email; we’d like to know who you are, not just who’s published you — if you’re in, from, or have roots in Detroit, let us know! While students, faculty, and staff, currently or formerly (within reason) affiliated with Wayne State University are ineligible for consideration or publication of original work, anyone is welcome to submit reviews & responses.
We’re committed to creating space for voices that are traditionally and systemically silenced, and The Woodward Review hopes to establish processes for affirmative editorial action. We acknowledge it’s impossible to escape aesthetic biases when deciding what makes good art, so we do not intend to try to find what is “good.” We welcome experiments and failures, but submissions or submitters that support racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classism, sexism, ableism need not apply.
We believe in the importance of compensating all workers for work, and we will always pay our contributors. For Volume 2 Issue #2, we're paying $50 per regular contributor. The Woodward Review purchases first North American print publication rights only; all other rights are retained by the author. We will also offer the option of publishing under a Creative Commons license. .
Most submissions get a response in 1– 3 months, but if it seems like there’s gum in the works or you have any other problems or questions, send an email with the subject line Query. If you’re accepted for publication, we’ll request links to previous online publications you’re proud of, or any books or chaps you have in print, to provide a wider template for reviewers & responders to consider your work.
Prose
Whether it’s pure fiction, nothing but the truth, or somewhere in between, we welcome anything you might call prose. In addition to traditional short stories and flash, creative nonfiction submissions can be lyric essay, memoir, researched narrative, or a personal obsession you discovered on Wikipedia but can’t stop thinking about. We’d really like to see prose writing that makes us wonder what it should be called.
Up to 5,000 words or up to three pieces ~500 words or less.
Poetry
We're looking for work that explodes or implodes the potentiality of language. We accept all types of poetry and encourage submissions that play around with the “page.” From confessional to conceptual, send poetry that crosses boundaries, upends expectations, and reimagines what the form can do. Bonus points for poems that make us think about something we’ve never thought of before. We’d like you to say something, emotional, or political, or natural, something that you think makes a difference merely by being spoken.
You can submit up to five poems. The length of each poem is at the poet’s discretion, but if we go on any further, this description will start to sound like a McSweeney’s piece.
Art, Hybrid, & Digital Media
We want any art in any modality, and digital media for anything that can't be understood in a static frame. Send us sculptures or installations, paintings or sketches, designs or deconstructions, photography or videos; we’re also interested in forms that combine the written word with any of the above. We’d especially love to see some digital or hybrid essays.
You can submit up to ten pages or images. Along with your submission, please include a single doc or docx file with an artist statement, a name for the collection, and a list of the works submitted.