Submission Guidelines

There are two ways to submit your work to Call & Response:

1.  You can post short poetry and prose (up to 500 words) in the comments of the blog post to which you are responding.
2.  You can email longer work (in .doc or .docx format), as well as PDF, JPG, and MP3 files to callandresponsezine@gmail.com.

All submissions must be a response to either a prompt or a piece of work that has previously appeared in Call & Response (this includes comments to the blog). We know that inspiration can take different forms, and do not expect your work to reference directly to its “call,” but it should stem from it in some way.

With this in mind, please clearly indicate what piece you are responding to in the body of your comment or email. Submissions that are not clearly identifiable in this way as a response will not be considered for inclusion. And please include your name and a short bio or link to your website with the piece, so that we can correctly attribute it should it be chosen for publication.

Content for print editions of Call & Response will be selected from comments and email submission at the discretion of the editors. All submissions to the blog via comments will be approved and displayed, but this does not guarantee their inclusion in a print issue or as a featured blog entry.  For email submissions, we do our best to respond promptly, but if you do not hear back from us within three weeks, please feel free to email us again to make sure we’ve received your submission.

A note on rights: Although all submissions to Call & Response remain the property of their original author, by submitting, you grant Call & Response first publication rights. You also grant the right to any other reader to reuse elements of your work in their own contributions to Call & Response. We trust you to know the difference between fair use and plagiarism. Call & Response operates under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can find more information on this and other forms of Creative Commons licensing here.

A further note on courtesy: We shouldn’t have to say this because we’re sure you’re all lovely people, but Call & Response is intended to be a positive forum for creative collaboration. While we encourage you to converse thoughtfully with fellow submitters through your work, please do so in a respectful way, and keep in mind that this is a space for creating new work, not critique or criticism.