Shenandoah Literary Magazine

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Shenandoah Literary Magazine

...passionate understanding, formal accomplishment & serious mischief. Online at http://shenandoahliterary.org.

09/09/2025

New post up on our blog! Check out “The Periods Between the Waves: An Interview with Dan Reiter about On a Rising Swell” at shenandoahliterary.org/thepeak 🌊

09/02/2025

We’ve got a busy fall! We’re open now for comics submissions. We’ll open next week for fiction. We’ll be accepting a new round of editorial fellow applications starting October 1. And our Graybeal-Gowan Prize celebrating poets who live or have lived in Virginia opens October 15. We’ll be announcing our new CNF editor soon!

09/01/2025

Comic submissions are open now with a special call from Robert James Russell.

“I’m looking for work that leans into nonfiction and memoir—fragments of memory, moments reimagined, messy truths on the page. Show me life as it is, or as it feels. Bring me the joyful, the painful, the complicated, the contradictory.
Comics are such a remarkable medium: words and images colliding, amplifying, contradicting, and opening new ways of seeing. I want to be surprised by how you use that space. Black and white? Color? Minimalist? Maximalist? Something I can’t quite name yet? All welcome.
I’m drawn to work that challenges form, thinks big, and lingers in the mind. So, send me comics that risk something—comics that move, unsettle, delight, or reshape how we think about what the form can do.”

08/08/2025

In partnership with , we’re thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s Hope Prize, Isaac Kanyinji. His poem “A 2019 Survey on How People Imagine Themselves Dying” will appear in this fall’s issue.

The Hope Prize celebrates the best of Zambian prose and poetry in collaboration with Ubwali, founded and edited by former Shenandoah editorial fellow Mubanga Kalimamukwento.

Congratulations, Isaac! We’re honored to be able to support and amplify your work.

07/29/2025

“Excavating and Deconstructing: An Interview with Shah Tazrian Ashrafi” is now available on The Peak. Learn more about the short story, “Camp,” appearing in volume 74.1-2!

07/19/2025

“I began the reluctant task of dispatching the surprise of death into my fifteen-year-old imagination.” –darlene anita scott from Shenandoah Volume 74.1-2 Spring 2025

06/23/2025

What better way to get familiar with our contributors than to test your knowledge?! Be on the lookout for daily questions about the 75th anniversary issue!

05/21/2025

One of our poetry contributors for our upcoming anniversary issue, Emma Neale, just won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 🥳🥳 Congratulations from Shenandoah, Emma!

05/14/2025

Keep submitting your nonfiction pieces! 👏👏

Read the call below:
Submissions should be under 8,000 words. Flash is welcome. We love writing that stretches our imagination and ways of thinking, surprises, makes us laugh, is formally interesting or challenging, defies genre, explores the confusing or uncomfortable, introduces us to new writers, thinks globally, has a distinctive voice, cares about the world, and does not assume white people are literature’s default characters.
We’ll only consider one submission per author at a time; no multiple submissions in different genres, please! We’ll also consider only one submission per reading period. In other words, if you submit a piece of nonfiction and it isn’t accepted, please wait until our next reading period to submit a new piece unless you’ve been specifically invited to resubmit. Submitted work should be previously unpublished in English. Work simultaneously submitted elsewhere will be considered, but we ask that you withdraw the work immediately if it is accepted (and congratulations, by the way!).

04/28/2025

ANNOUNCING Our Fall 2025 Issue Editorial Fellow In Poetry TRAN TRAN!!! Tran Tran (she/her) writes in the muddle between English and Vietnamese. Her poetry has been featured on Salamander Magazine, The Seventh Wave, Threads Lit Mag and more. She currently serves in the reading staff of ONLY POEMS and Frontier Poetry. A community-driven artist, Tran enjoys running writing workshops, hosting open mic and poetry podcast through her Vietnam-based project Thơ Thở (Pulsating Poetry).

Submissions are also currently open for multilingual poetry, and will stay open until MAY 15. See her call below:

"For this issue on Multilingual Poetry, I want work that dismantles, disrupts, and detonates the borders between languages. I welcome poems that refuse token italicization and assert their cultural and linguistic roots on the colonial terrain of English.

Write what your bilingual or multilingual tongue aches to say. Take up all the space your non-English voice(s) demand. Play with confusion, slippage, and dissonance across syntax and diction. No need to explain or translate. Let the collision of languages—your mother languages, your ghost languages, your living and forgotten ones—reveal their own friction and fracture. Make English work to meet you, or let it fall apart trying."

04/15/2025

We are NOW ACCEPTING multilingual poetry submissions, to be reviewed by our Editorial Fellow in Poetry, Tran Tran! Swipe to read her special call, and submit your work on shenandoah.submittable.com/submit 🥳

04/10/2025

It’s that time! We’re opening up for multilingual poetry submissions starting on April 15 🥳 Our new editorial fellow in poetry, Tran Tran, will be reviewing the submissions!

Read the call below:
For this issue on Multilingual Poetry, I want work that dismantles, disrupts, and detonates the borders between languages. I welcome poems that refuse token italicization and assert their cultural and linguistic roots on the colonial terrain of English.

Write what your bilingual or multilingual tongue aches to say. Take up all the space your non-English voice(s) demand. Play with confusion, slippage, and dissonance across syntax and diction. No need to explain or translate. Let the collision of languages—your mother languages, your ghost languages, your living and forgotten ones—reveal their own friction and fracture. Make English work to meet you, or let it fall apart trying.

You’ll be able to submit on shenandoah.submittable.com/submit in 5️⃣ days!

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http://shenandoahliterary.org/

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