Submit

how to submit

Please use our online submission manager, found here. Before submitting, read through our guidelines below. We do not accept submissions via post or email. Submissions sent via post or email will be discarded without being read.

Our editors are all volunteers who are busy with their own lives, so please be patient as we sift through submissions. Feel free to send a query if you have not heard anything after 90 days, but please know that we consider all submissions and will get back to you eventually. If you haven’t gotten a response, your piece is still under consideration. Our slowness ensures careful consideration of each submission.

IMPORTANT!! BEFORE YOU SUBMIT: Please check and double check your document to ensure that you are not including your name or other identifying information. We do not want to know who you are or where you live or where you’ve gone to school. We read blindly and your submission WILL be returned to you if it includes any identifying information. Please respect this requirement — it helps us to make our decisions based solely on the merit of the text, as it should be. Our submissions manager keeps track of who submits what without showing us that information, so don’t worry–we will be able to get in touch with you without you telling us who you are in the document. You’ll have a chance to tell us about yourself after we’ve accepted your submission.

No cover letter is necessary.

Though we are unspeakably grateful to our contributors and we know that we could not operate without them, we are unable to offer payment at this time. Our issues are free and available to the public, however, and you can link to your publication for the world to see. We ask for first North American serial rights, but upon publication the rights to your piece will revert back to you. We simply ask that you credit us with first publishing your work should it be reprinted in the future.

What we’re looking for:

Your work should be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your submission via Submishmash or contact us if your work is accepted elsewhere–if you need to withdraw only part of a submission, email us at mixedfruitmag@gmail.com and we will make sure that the appropriate pieces remain under consideration. We will accept up to five submissions from an author at a time. Do not mix genres when submitting–if you have a poem and a story, for example, please submit them separately.

We offer submitters the opportunity to include a $3.00 donation with their work. Our magazine is run entirely on donations and the personal funds of our editors. Though your donation will not in any way affect the decisions of editors, we are very appreciative of your generosity. We receive no profits and survive thanks to those who read our words, offer us their work, and are kind enough to share a few dollars with us now and then.

Poetry:

Please submit between one and five poems at a time; please include all poems in a single document. Poems do not need to be double-spaced–format your poem as you would like to see it in print.

Fiction:

We’ll accept fiction submissions up to 8000 words–any style, any genre. Stories should be double-spaced and should include a header with the title and page number.

Creative Nonfiction:

We’ll accept creative nonfiction submissions up to 8000 words–any subject. Nonfiction should be double-spaced and should include a header with the title and page number.

Translations:

We welcome literary translations provided you have obtained the rights to the work being translated. Works must be translated from the native language into English and submissions must include the original text and the original author’s name. We are currently accepting works translated from Portuguese, French, Spanish, Thai, German, and Russian into English. We may add more languages, so check back.

Art:

You may submit up to five previously unpublished pieces of art (photographs, comics, drawings, etc) as long as they are in one of the aforementioned formats.

Miscellany:

Here at Mixed Fruit we believe in possibilities, which is why we’ve decided to introduce a new category for submissions: Miscellaneous works. In keeping with Mixed Fruit’s aesthetic of eclecticism, we’d like to see a wider selection of “art” that maybe doesn’t fit the well-worn preconceived notions of what is “artful.” We’re talking genre-bending, transcendence of categorization, experimentation on the edge, the brinks, the borders. Liminal explorations.

What do we mean by miscellaneous? Simply put, anything that doesn’t exclusively fit as fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Works that incorporate typography, experimental soundscapes, videologues, recipes, silent film, animation, comics, and rogue power points are a few examples, but the point here is that we’re not limited to anything, and neither are you. Surprise us. Move us. Frighten us. Stretch our definition of “artful” beyond its elastic limits.

If your miscellaneous piece fits any of the file types below, we’ll take it: PDF, DOCX, RTF, WPF, ODT,  JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, MP3, MP4, M4a