General Guidelines:
Our reading period runs from October 15 until April 15. Please submit only one story or essay, or up to three flash prose pieces, or up to four poems at a time. Multiple submissions will not be considered.
We do accept simultaneous submissions. In the event that a piece is accepted for publication elsewhere, please either withdraw the entire submission via Submittable or leave a note on your submission indicating which piece(s) you want to withdraw.
Only previously unpublished work will be considered for inclusion in the journal.
Response time varies, but we will do our best to respond to submissions within 6 months. If you have not heard from us after 6 months, you may send inquiries to our email address.
Should your piece be selected for publication, Quarter After Eight hereby claims first North American serial publication rights (for the print edition) and first electronic media publication rights (for publication on the journal’s website). All rights revert to you, the author, upon publication. You will receive two copies of our print edition.
Quarter After Eight’s 2024 Poetry Chapbook Contest, judged by Hieu Minh Nguyen
Well, we had such a great response for the first one that it only felt right to come back for round 2. So: welcome to our 2nd annual poetry chapbook contest! This contest is open to poetry (though we like hybrid collages, mashups, acts of desperation, and/or other works that are otherwise impossible to categorize so long as they give us that nice and weird poetic feeling).
What do we want? Send us your Lizzie McGuire Movie poems mashed up next to the ones you can’t show your parents. We want the ones where you realize you took a wrong turn way too late, and now the poem has taken on a life accruing insurmountable credit card debt. Think: fast car, steep cliff. Think: the only way out is the only way out. Think: you’re in the bar bathroom and the lighting makes you feel like everything, just this once, is going catastrophically right. Send us your pop culture slamming into your miserable love poem. Send us your glitz and glam spilling onto the floor of the gas station bathroom (where you’ve conveniently left your number on the paper towel dispenser). We like funny, we like referential, we like a little critique mixed in. Make us laugh, make us go outside and have a stern and ultimately unrewarding conversation with our impulsive inner monologue. Give our desire new desires; crush us with that newfound feeling.
Surprising language is a given, envy-inducing language is required, as is the entry fee of $15. The contest is open to new, emerging, and established writers. We especially encourage submissions by writers from underrepresented groups. The winner will receive a $1,000 cash award and 25 beautifully designed print copies of their chapbook. Five finalists will be chosen by the editorial team at Quarter After Eight, and judge Hieu Minh Nguyen will select a winner, as well as first and second runners up.
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Some awards and fellowships Hieu has received include: the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.
Important Details
All entries are read without identifying information by QAE editors. Please do not include any identifying information on the manuscript itself, including in the name of your file, in the "title" field in Submittable, or in the margins. Please include a title page (listing only the title of the work) and table of contents (if applicable). Manuscripts should be paginated and in a legible font that doesn’t burn our eyes to look at for prolonged periods of time. Manuscripts should be 20-30 pages in length, not including front and back matter (table of contents, title page, etc.). You are welcome to include a brief bio or something about yourself in your cover note on Submittable. If any of your included poems have been published in other journals, please include that information (title, journal, publication date) in the form of a list in the cover letter field.
Submissions will be open from July 8, 2024 to September 8, 2023. A $15 entry fee is required upon submission.