The Woodward Review
There are presently no open calls for submissions.
The Woodward Review
Open for submissions September 1 — November 1; January 1 — March 1
Include a short cover letter & bio in the "cover letter" form of Submittable; we’d like to know who you are, not just who’s published you. While students, faculty, and staff, currently or formerly (within reason) affiliated with Wayne State University are ineligible for consideration or publication of original work, anyone is welcome to submit reviews & responses.
Most submissions get a response in 1– 3 months, but if it seems like there’s gum in the works or you have any other problems or questions, send an email with the subject line Query.
We believe in the importance of compensating all workers for work, and we will always pay our contributors. For Issue #2, we're paying $50 per regular contributor. The Woodward Review purchases first North American print publication rights only; all other rights are retained by the author. We will also offer the option of publishing under a Creative Commons license.
Prose
Whether it’s pure fiction, nothing but the truth, or somewhere in between, we welcome anything you might call prose. In addition to traditional shorts stories and flash, creative nonfiction submissions can be lyric essay, memoir, researched narrative, personal obsession you discovered on Wikipedia but can’t stop thinking about, a discarded draft of your master's thesis... we mean it, send us your scholarly work! We’d really like to see prose writing that makes us wonder what it should be called.
Up to 5,000 words or up to three pieces ~500 words or less.
Poetry
We're looking for work that explodes or implodes the potentiality of language. We accept all types of poetry and encourage submissions that play around with the “page.” From confessional to conceptual, send poetry that crosses boundaries, upends expectations, and reimagines what the form can do. Bonus points for poems that make us think about something we’ve never thought of before. We’d like you to say something, emotional, or political, or natural, something that you think makes a difference merely by being spoken.
You can submit up to five poems. The length of each poem is at the poet’s discretion, but if we go on any further, this description will start to sound like a McSweeney’s piece.
Art, Hybrid, & Digital Media
We want any art in any modality, and digital media for anything that can't be understood in a static frame. Send us sculptures or installations, paintings or sketches, designs or deconstructions, photography or videos; we’re also interested in forms that combine the written word with any of the above. We’d especially love to see some digital or hybrid essays.
You can submit up to ten pages or images. Along with your submission, please include a single doc or docx file with an artist statement, a name for the collection, and a list of the works submitted.
Reviews & Responses:
Our central goal is to curate conversation, which we hope to achieve by rejecting the traditional trajectory from the artistic to the critical work it inspires; we believe there's so much more to say when the creative and the critical can respond in any direction, to themselves and each other. To that end, everything we publish, even more "academic" writing, should be treated like an ekphrastic object, inviting creative or critical study.
Every reader and contributor is encouraged to submit a review or response in any medium or genre, from poem to memoir, from doodle to researched essay. Regardless of the form of the original piece, we are seeking writing, art, hybrid and digital media that reflects your review of or response to something you found in The Woodward Review. Did you discover a short story hidden in the pixels of a photography series? Pick up a paintbrush to make sense of a poem? Find yourself writing an essay about something you read here and figured no one would care? Well, we do.
We’re especially interested in seeing work from writers whose obsessions are unfamiliar, scholars or artists whose areas of expertise we don’t (yet) understand. We also welcome book reviews of poetry and prose titles written in Detroit or by Detroiters, and published in the last two years.