Editorial Philosophy
VQR strives to publish the best writing we can find. While we have a long history of publishing accomplished and award-winning authors, we also seek and support emerging writers. A look at one of our latest issues will show you the diversity of voices we publish.
Genres
- Poetry: All types and length.
- Short Fiction: Length is 2,500–8,000 words. We are generally not interested in genre fiction (such as romance, science fiction, or fantasy).
- Nonfiction: Length is 3,000–7,000 words. We publish essays, memoir, and other types of literary journalism, as well as investigative reporting.
General Guidelines
- We only consider unpublished work. Please do not submit previously published material, including work published in anthologies, chapbooks, or online.
- We only accept submissions online via Submittable. We do not accept submissions via e-mail or post.
- Please read past issues of VQR before submitting your work so you have a clear sense of our editorial focus. A portion of every issue is freely available on our website. Or you can purchase a recent issue at your local newsstand or bookstore, or directly from us.
- Submissions are limited to one prose piece and five poems per reading period. Please group poetry into one submission. Multiple submissions in the same genre will be rejected unread.
- Simultaneous submissions are permitted.
- If work you have submitted to us is accepted elsewhere, please notify us immediately. For prose submissions, please use your Submittable account to withdraw your submission. For poetry submissions, please use your Submittable account to add a note to your submission listing the titles of works no longer available for consideration.
- We make every effort to respond within six months, but response time will vary according to the number of submissions. Please be patient with us; we typically receive more than 10,000 unsolicited works per year.
- Responses will be provided via Submittable. Please do not call or e-mail us regarding the status of your submission.
- Due to the high volume of submissions, we cannot respond personally to every submission.
- All files must be saved in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or PDF formats.
- Please prepare your submission in letter-sized format, with ample margins, double-spaced, using a standard typeface (e.g., Times, Helvetica, Arial) and font size (12 point is best). Please use minimal document and font styling in your submission.
Payment & Copyright
- For poetry, we pay $200 per poem, up to 5 poems. For prose, we generally pay approximately 25 cents per word, depending on length. For investigative reporting, we pay at a higher rate, sometimes including pre-approved travel expenses.
- Our standard publishing agreement asks for the following rights in exchange: first North American print and digital rights; nonexclusive online rights; and other limited rights. Copyright is retained by the author at all times. Authors are free to resell the work, though we do ask for a 90-day exclusive from our first publication of the work.
Please do not e-mail us to ask if we received your submission. If the submissions system acknowledged your submission, or if you received an e-mail confirming receipt of your submission, then rest assured that we have received it.
#VQRTrueStory is a social-media experiment in nonfiction that delivers stories across platforms—from Instagram to the website to the print magazine. We’re looking for submissions of three nonfiction dispatches—on any topic—with accompanying photos. This project asks the contributor, like any journalist, to look outward. The trick is compressing the longform experience into a shortform template, which often means testing out new forms and upending conventional approaches. Think Studs Terkel with an iPhone, or Thelonious Monk with a reporter’s notebook. We're also interested in work across styles and even genres—essays, satire, humor—as long as it can comfortably be categorized as a "true story."
In your approach to the #VQRTrueStory, it is important to remember that the text should not simply be an expanded caption, and should avoid articulating what the viewers already sees or digests in the image. Rather, this format explores the relationship between text and image, such that the viewer’s attitude or understanding of the image is changed by the time they reach the end of the text. Think of the image as the nut graph and the text as the body of the story.
To get a sense of how #VQRTS works, we recommend taking a look at the archive on our website (https://www.vqronline.org/articles/2015/12/vqrtruestory) or our Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/vqreview/?hl=en).
Submission requirements:
1-3 nonfiction dispatches with a max of 2,200 characters (including spaces) each.
Several photos to accompany the written work.
Lengths accepted: 2,500 to 8,000 words. We are generally not interested in genre fiction (such as romance, science fiction, or fantasy). We only consider unpublished work. Please do not submit previously published material, including work published in anthologies, chapbooks, or online. You may submit one story in each reading period.
Lengths accepted: 3,000 to 7,000 words. We publish essays, memoir, and other types of literary journalism, as well as investigative reporting.
We only consider unpublished work. Please do not submit previously published material, including work published in anthologies, chapbooks, or online. You may only submit one piece in each reading period.
We accept all types and lengths of poetry. You may submit up to five poems of fewer than fifteen pages total in each reading period. These should be grouped together in the same submission.