PRISM international publishes exciting, original, literary material from established and emerging writers in Canada and around the world.

We accept submissions year-round. Reply times range between six to twelve months, and we may not be able to respond to emails regarding the status of a submission. Some of our content is generated from our annual fiction, poetry, short forms, and creative non-fiction contests. Please visit our contest page for more details.

Please note: PRISM does not accept submissions from current and incoming students and faculty of the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing (this includes the UBC Optional-Residency MFA Program). Work submitted by incoming students prior to their acceptance to the UBC School of Creative Writing, if still under consideration, must be withdrawn. In order to submit, UBC alumni cannot have taken a UBC School of Creative Writing course during the previous two years.

GENERAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Submissions must be made through Submittable. We do not accept submissions via email or mail, except from incarcerated writers. For all other submitters, we charge a $3.00 reading fee per submission. Writers for whom the $3.00 fee is prohibitive are welcome to submit using the Inclusive Access option on Submittable.

Submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and paginated. Please specify the genre of your submission in your cover letter. All submissions should be set in Times New Roman, 12-point font.

Include in your cover letter your full contact information (including your email address) and a bio of 50 words or fewer that makes reference to where you live.

We accept simultaneous submissions, and we ask that you let us know if your piece is accepted elsewhere, OR withdraw it from our Submittable. We purchase first North American serial rights and pay $40 per printed page for prose and $45 per printed page for poetry. Contributors also receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears.

We encourage submissions from Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, LGBTQQIP2SAA+ writers, and writers from other intersectional and marginalized groups, including low-income earners. If you identify as one or more of the above and would like to let us know, please mention it in your cover letter.

PROSE GUIDELINES

• We accept fiction, creative non-fiction, comics, hybrid works, and literary essays. We do not publish rhetorical, academic, or strictly journalistic non-fiction.
• Our preferred length for submissions is 4,000 words or less. We have a limited page count and aim to feature a variety of voices.
• Submit only one piece at a time, unless you are submitting flash fiction or non-fiction (under 1,000 words), in which case you may submit up to three pieces in a single document. Please wait to hear back before submitting again.

Click here to submit prose.

If you have any questions about these guidelines or a piece you’ve already submitted, please email Sierra Louie at prism.prose@ubc.ca.

POETRY GUIDELINES

• Submit up to four poems, to a maximum of six pages. Do NOT submit six one-page poems.
• We welcome cross-genre and interdisciplinary poetry and poetics.
• In your cover letter, please specify the number of poems you are submitting and list the titles of the poems.
• Poetry submissions should be typed and single-spaced. If you would like to submit poems with alternate spacing, please mention it in your cover letter and submit a PDF instead of a Word document.

Click here to submit poetry. 

If you have any questions about these guidelines or a piece you’ve already submitted, please email Ayda Niknami at prism.poetry@ubc.ca.

Translation

• PRISM welcomes the best of translation into English from all over the world and offers compensation and contributor copies to original authors as well as the translators. Let us know if you’d like to see sample translator and original author contracts to get an idea of the information that we require.
• We only accept translations that have been undertaken with the permission of the original author or rights holder, and we will ask to see confirmation of this permission before we publish.
• Please include a copy of the original work with your submission.

Poetry Translations

• We pay $45/printed page plus two mailed contributor copies, and $30/printed page to the original author plus two mailed contributor copies. PRISM may choose to publish original poems alongside translations, and this will be up to the editor to decide on a case-by-case basis.

Prose Translations 

• We pay $40/printed page for prose translations plus two mailed contributor copies, and $25 per printed page to the original author up to $200, plus two mailed contributor copies.

Visual Art

• We accept visual art submitted by email in high-resolution JPEG, TIF or PNG files. We pay $300 CAD for the cover of one issue, along with two copies of that issue. An image of the cover will also appear on our website, the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers website, and the affiliated websites of Magazines Canada.
• We accept visual art for interior pages in PRISM in high-resolution JPEG, TIF or PNG files. We pay $50 per interior page, up to $250, and we can print a limited number of pages per issue in colour. We provide two contributor copies.
• We are happy to pay additional licensing and copyright fees if necessary, or to provide additional contributor copies to the artist’s studio or gallery.

Please send photography submissions to Ihomehe Agbebaku, Managing Editor, at prism.circ@ubc.ca.

Reasonable exceptions to our guidelines will be made for submissions from
incarcerated writers.

Reviews and Interviews

PRISM international welcomes review copies of high-quality literary fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, graphic novels, theatre, and chapbooks. We also accept pitches for interviews with local or international authors. If you’d like to do a review or interview for us, please contact our reviews editor Cid V Brunet at prism.reviews@ubc.ca. We ask you to disclose any conflict of interest prior to submitting a review. 

Reviews and interviews are published weekly on our website. We pay $60 per piece.