Thank you for submitting to Trace Fossils. We look forward to experiencing your work. Please see the guidelines within the forms below and reach out with any questions you may have.
We accept original, previously unpublished pieces. Responses will be sent out within sixteen weeks.
With best wishes,
Jessie, Ellie, and the Editors
"The Art in Wake of the Artist."
We host four submission periods for our quarterly publication:
- Summer: March-April
- Fall: June-July
- Winter: September-October
- Spring: December-January
This window lies outside of regular submissions. Submissions close on November 30th at 11:59pm EST.
- Poetry: Up to 3 pieces per period. No longer than 132 lines in length (a total three pages in our print issues). Submit all poetry in Times New Roman, 12pt font, single spaced. We accept .docx and .word files. Please include all submissions in one file.
- Fiction: One piece at a time, with a maximum of 4,000 words. For anything shorter than 300 words, we max out at three submissions per period.
- Nonfiction: Personal essays, journalism, memoirs, lyric essays, critical essays and the like. One piece per reading period. Maximum of 4,000 words.
- Art/Multimedia: Up to 3 pieces per submission period. Submit all photography and multimedia as TIFF and JPEG files. Submissions must have an image quality of at least 300 ppi. Please include all submissions in ONE FILE.
Please make sure that your name or other personal information does not appear anywhere within your document.
We encourage simultaneous submissions. You’re welcome to have your piece running in multiple tabs; just keep us updated if you are accepted elsewhere. Most decisions are made within sixteen weeks of submission.
We ask for First Serial Rights for all pieces. All rights revert back to the creator after six months. If your accepted piece is published anywhere at a later date, we ask that you credit the work as being originally published in Trace Fossils Review. We reserve the right to republish the piece or include it in any anthologies, as well as to display it in our archives. Pieces that won awards but were not published (including, for instance, recognition by YoungArts or the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards), are more than welcome.
We do not currently pay for pieces. We print a yearly anthology; all who are accepted into our print publication will receive one contributor copy.
Trace Fossils Review only publishes original work. By submitting to our magazine, you are verifying that your work is original, that AI was not used anywhere in the process of creating your piece, and no part of your work has been plagiarized or replicated without written permission from the original creator.
If you believe your work may be sensitive to some readers, include a trigger warning. We don’t read cover letters until after, so put a small note at the top of your submission document.
This review holds no tolerance for bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and prejudice of the like. Any pieces that preach that gospel will be immediately turned away, and the artist will be barred from future submissions.