Submissions

General

• Thank you for considering Room for the publication of your original short stories, poems, creative non-fiction, or art. Room publishes original work by women. We strongly suggest you get a sense of our tastes by reviewing material we've published in recent issues—buy newsstand copies, subscribe, borrow from a library, or visit our latest edition online. Alternatively, you can order single copies of specific issues.
• Check our home page regularly for updates on upcoming themes and deadlines. If your work is targeted for a particular theme, it will be considered for that theme as long as it is sent by the deadline. There is no need to add a special note or designation.
• We receive over 1200 submissions each year and can only publish approximately 80 pieces. So send your absolutely best piece of work.
• Please be sure to send us work that has not been previously published in print or on-line.
• We do not publish the same writer more than twice a year, and never in consecutive issues.
• To avoid a flood of material by a single submitter or overly frequent submissions, please send only one submission per quarter (one submission of poetry can include up to five poems).
• Do not send a second submission until you have heard back from us considering the first one.
• Tell us in your cover letter whether your submission is exclusive to us or whether you have submitted it to other magazines as well.
• If another magazine accepts for publication work that you have also submitted to Room, advise us immediately.
• We respond by email and we do not return manuscripts.
• If you are using Hotmail or Gmail, please be sure to designate Room as an approved sender to prevent our response being caught up in your spam filters.

Online Submissions

We use Submittable, a secure online submissions management tool, to manage our submissions. When you submit your work, you will also be creating an account that will allow you to log in at any time to check the status of your submission. Follow these simple steps to submit your work:

1. Go to http://room.submishmash.com/submit.
2. Create your account by entering the requested information.
3. Choose your category/genre and click the Submit button.
4. Enter the work's title, your cover letter*, and attach your submission. For poetry submissions, combine all poems into one document and start each poem on a new page.
5. You're done! Log back in any time to check the status of your submission.

Please note that our recent switch to Submittable from email submission will not affect submissions received before the change; writers who sent work before the transition can still expect to hear back from us by email within our normal reading timeframes.

If you run into any problems, please email submissions@roommagazine.com.
For more information about Submittable, go to http://www.submittable.com.

*Don't forget to provide us with the following information in your cover letter:

• If/where you've published previously; published writers you've worked/mentored/studied with;
• Contests you've won, grants you've been awarded, writing programs you've attended, prizes you've garnered, full- length book manuscripts you may currently have under contract or in circulation.
• Your name, address, phone number, and email address.
• For fiction and creative non-fiction, an accurate word count of your piece.

Art Submission

Send us your most engaging work. These are not images to illustrate the literature, but submissions of their own standing. Submit up to five images (maximum of 1MB sized JPG or PDF) with a short paragraph about the work of art including: the title, size, medium and date. Please include a cover letter as stated in the general submissions (above). All art submissions should be sent through Submittable.

Size Limits

• Fiction and creative non-fiction: Up to 3500 words
• Poetry: Up to five poems
• Art: up to 5 images

See also our FAQs.

Download Room's submission guidelines (PDF).