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Submission Guidelines

Saga City is a new journal looking to publish poetry & fiction from a balance of established & emerging writers. We love a strong image, a fresh metaphor, a moment of lyrical beauty. We like poems that are in love with language & their subject, both the intimate & the vast. We like evocative stories with a clear voice & strong characters. A good place to begin is our name: what sagas (both singular & global) are yet untold, what cities (both beautiful & desolate) are not yet built?

You do not have to limit yourself to the idea of the City, though. It comes in many forms; it is everywhere even when it is not. Is the city worth saving? Is it worth building in the first place? What is left when the city shatters & the roads crumble? What will we build in its place? What beautiful thing shall we make of this ruin? Send us your best work, the work you love with all your heart, that we may share in loving it with you.

**Submissions are currently CLOSED**

General:

- Send all submissions to sagacitylit@gmail.com.

- Include either "POETRY" or "FICTION" in the subject line of your email.

- Attach your submission as a .doc or .docx, not in the body of the email.

- Please do not include your name anywhere on the submission document.

- Please only submit to one genre per reading period.

- Query letters aren't required, though you are more than welcome to say hello & tell us a little about your writing! You may include a brief bio (~50 words) if you choose, though this is also not required.

- We do not consider work that has been previously published, including to personal blogs or social media pages.

- We do not consider work that has been "AI-generated" by ChatGPT or any other such language-learning model. If we discover afterwards that a piece of writing is AI-generated, we reserve the right to remove the piece from the magazine and blacklist the author from future submissions. We take this seriously: art comes from people, not machines.

- We do accept simultaneous submissions! Please let us know as soon as possible & withdraw the piece if it is accepted elsewhere.

- We aim to respond within 2-3 months, though it may be quicker or slower depending on the volume of submissions! We're all working poets & writers on the staff as well, so we get it, trust us.

Poetry:

- Send no more than 3 poems. Please include all poems in a single file.

- Priority will usually go to poems 1-2 pages long, but poems of any length are fine, & we encourage you to send your long poems!

Fiction:

- Short stories around 5,000-7,000 words are preferred. We may accept a longer work if we really love it, but please send a pitch for the story using the form below first. Minimum 1500 words. We are a small team, so for now please only send 1 story at a time.

Sometimes a piece of writing defies genre or form. That's okay! Send that too. Let us know how you see your work existing in the world. Hybrid forms are welcomed & loved here.

A note:

We will not accept works which promote prejudiced hatred of any kind. That means no racism, no queerphobia, no sexism, no xenophobia. We're not into that. Evil, as Ursula K. Le Guin writes, is banal. Bigotry is boring & uninteresting. We reserve the right to automatically decline any writing/author that seeks to promote such prejudice.

For questions & pitches, reach out here:

Thanks for reaching out! We'll get back to you ASAP.

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