We’re open for art, interviews, translations, and reviews, as well as poetry and pieces on Ukraine. We’re also open until April 21 for excerpts from forthcoming books released by independent presses. Then we’ll close until July 1.
ACM Residency
In 2023, Another Chicago Magazine will award a free multi-week residency in Belfast, Maine, which is on the coast, about two hours north of Portland and one hour southeast of Bangor. S.L. Wisenberg, ACM editor and author of the forthcoming Juniper prizewinner, The Wandering Womb, is the final judge. We’ll announce the winner in spring.
Our mission:
We love work that is personal and political and shows that you can write beautifully and incisively about important subjects.
We also call for theme submissions from time to time. In the second half of 2019 we published pieces on the theme of race/riot/rebellion/revolution in order to commemorate the 1919 Chicago race riot, the 1919 Red Summer, and the 400th anniversary of the introduction of slavery in what became the US. In 2021 we asked for submissions on displacement.
Though we no longer have specific submission portals on those themes, we always welcome work that deals with the general subjects of race/riot/rebellion/revolution and displacement.
As writers, we know how hard it is to wait for a response, so we accept simultaneous submissions. We are committed to small presses and express that in our Forthcoming series and in our reviews (though occasionally we will run a review of a book published by a large press). We promote our authors’ work on social media, including their publications and awards after they publish with ACM. We submit work to Best American and Pushcart.
What we publish:
Ukraine
As an online journal that publishes twice a week, we are able to get pieces out quickly. We’re seeking nonfiction about the invasion of Ukraine, such as Sergey Gerasimov’s devastating report from Kharkiv. We seek the concrete, the personal, not the theoretical or polemical. You can send drafts, queries, or finished work. We are also seeking photos.
Translations–submissions closed Feb. 1-June 1, 2023
We welcome translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama (including excerpts from novels or from full-length plays). Whenever possible, we also publish the piece in the original language. We need written permission of the writer whose work has been translated.
Reviews and review-essays
Unlike many other literary magazines, ACM welcomes book reviews and review-essays about history and social issues. We’re most interested in books that provide new ways of looking at subjects. We also publish reviews and review-essays of works of literature. We encourage creativity in form. We occasionally publish reviews of other art forms. We now have separate review portals for poetry and for prose. Publishers and authors may also send queries through those portals.
Interviews
We are open to queries about interviews with writers, activists, artists, and public intellectuals. As a rule, we require interviews to be conducted in person, by phone, by Zoom or the like.
Art
We publish art with each work of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and welcome all sorts of media. We also publish portfolios of an artist’s work (including photographers). Please query with a link to your web site or attachments.
Nonfiction
We seek memoir, reported essays, braided essays, collages, vignettes, extremely literary journalism, oral history, meditations, combinations of the previous. Short, long, medium. Political in the largest sense. We are reading now.
Fiction
We publish short-short to long, no restrictions on style or content, though we prefer work that is 7500 words or fewer. We’re reading now.
Poetry
We publish all kinds. We’re not reading poetry now.
Another Chicago Magazine 