Category: Submissions

Postponing Release of It Was Paradise

As she announced recently on social media, Sonia Sulaiman, guest editor for It Was Paradise, Reckoning’s forthcoming special issue on war, conflict, and environmental justice, has had to step down from that role due to circumstances beyond anybody’s control. We’re profusely grateful for her work on the issue. Our original intention was for It Was Paradise to be released starting this October, but given the circumstances, we’re making the call to postpone this special issue long enough to make up for lost time, give the impressive volume of submissions we received the attention and consideration the authors deserve, and put out an issue worthy of its devastating and complex subject matter. Please stay tuned for the announcement of our new guest editor and release date, which will likely be early in 2026.

The release schedule for our collectively edited, tenth regular issue, Reckoning X, will remain unchanged.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.

General Submission Call: Reckoning X

For the milestone tenth issue of Reckoning, our sixth under fascist misrule, we’re practicing what we preach. Reckoning X will be edited collectively by our entire editorial staff, and it will be themed, broadly, around communication and the ways we communicate about environmental justice.

What brought us to this? How do those of us who grasp the direness of our situation—as a species, as a global community—convey or fail to convey that to others? These are dauntingly complex questions, and it’s clear the familiar solutions fall catastrophically short. Show us new answers, new framings. Reach for the weird tools, the neglected ones. Show us how journalism should work. Tell us stories about stories. Illuminate the economic structures behind our educational institutions and the walls against understanding that dog our international borders. Interpret the data for us, then interpret the interpreters. Let’s crack open the ways knowledge is produced and spread amid late-stage capitalism.

We’re seeking art, poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction up to 15,000 words in length, in particular from Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent and/or otherwise marginalized writers and artists from everywhere. Payment will be 10 15 cents per word (US) for prose, $50 $75 per page for poetry and art. Deadline for this issue is the autumnal solar equinox, September 22, 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work here.

After the autumnal equinox, for the first time ever, Reckoning will temporarily close to submissions. Ten years is a long time. An open call for creative writing on environmental justice constitues a torrent of ideas as well as raw emotions—anxiety, grief, loss, anger as well as love and hope. We’ve learned so much, but our readers deserve a break. We’ll reopen in 2026 with updated guidelines and a new format.

Special Submission Call: It Was Paradise

 

************SUBMISSIONS FOR IT WAS PARADISE ARE NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SUBMITTED.************

It’s time to announce the call for submissions to It Was Paradise*, a special issue of Reckoning edited by Sonia Sulaiman and with cover art by Mónica Robles Corzo. In a world devastated by catastrophes, we need stories that confront these horrors. This is all out war on the planet, on life itself. War and conflict as viewed through the lens of environmental justice, are the themes for this volume of Reckoning. Probe into the heart of extinction, genocide, and climate crisis. Expose the exploitation of the earth. Show us how the world could be on the other side. Send us your stories of violence, imperialism, fascism, and resistance, of destruction, survival, and of triumph. Send us your creative writing about war and environmental justice.

It Was Paradise is open for submissions now through the summer solstice, June 22, 2025, with tentative release scheduled for October. Payment rate will be 15 cents (US) per word for prose, $75 per page for poetry and art. As always, we’re seeking submissions from Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise marginalized human beings from everywhere, but in particular for this issue, we will be prioritizing work by people with lived experience of war and conflict. We’ll continue to accept submissions to our communication-themed regular issue, Reckoning X, throughout. Also, during this submission window only, we’re relaxing our usual rule about multiple submissions to allow folks to submit to both calls simultaneously.

Submit your work here! Read the full guidelines here.

*A reference to the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Big News: ARLA Grant, Payrate Increase, Special Issue Call Forthcoming!

The big news I have been murmuring about here and there on social media and elsewhere these past few weeks is finally ready for primetime: Reckoning Press has been awarded a substantial grant from Accelerate Resilience LA!

This generous and largely unlooked-for infusion of support means a lot to us—it feels like a validation of everything we’ve been doing here for the past eight years—but also, it’s going to mean some changes for you, intrepid reader, supporter, aspiring contributor to Reckoning.

First: for the duration of the grant (which is one year starting this month and ending July 31, 2025), we’re paying everybody 50% more for everything. That’s 15 cents per word for prose, $75 per page for poetry and art, $100 for reviews, AND our staff honoraria also increase accordingly across the board. I am super happy about this. Everybody deserves more money.

Second: we get to do another special issue! This issue has as yet neither a title nor editors, but what we can tell you with fair confidence is that it will open to submissions early in the new year (simultaneously with the open-themed Reckoning X) for release in October 2025, it will once again have a kickass Maya monster cover thanks to Mónica Robles Corzo, and it will be about war. Yes, war, and also about conflict, and the environmental and environmental justice consequences of both. The horrific genocide currently being perpetrated in Gaza, which politicians and media commentators insist on calling a war, is very much on our minds. So is what’s happening in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen, but also things like the situation along the US-Mexico border, the Uyghur genocide in China, and any situation anywhere in the world in which weapons of war are being employed to wreak destruction upon life.

More details about the above will be forthcoming soon; this note is intended merely as a celebratory toot upon the conch and an encouragement to get the creative wheels turning.

Reckoning 9 – Submission Call

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Reckoning 9 is open for general submissions! There is no specific theme for this issue; if your work concerns any aspect of environmental justice, from food sovereignty to ocean plastics to industrial cleanup to Indigenous rights, we want to see it. In fact, we look forward most eagerly to perspectives none of us has thought of. Please help us learn and understand.

The editors for the issue will be C.G. Aubrey, Priya Chand, and Catherine Rockwood, with help and support from the rest of the wonderful and brilliant Reckoning staff.

As always, we are seeking art, poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction up to 20,000 words in length, in particular from Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent and/or otherwise marginalized writers and artists from everywhere, and as of August 2024 we pay $75/page for poetry and art, 15c/word for prose. Deadline for this issue is the solar equinox, September 22, 2024.

Full guidelines are here. Please submit?

Reckoning 7 Out in Print! Reckoning Nominated for 7 Utopia Awards!

Reckoning 7 is officially out in print and shipping now! Preorders are already on their way. Get your copy here, or ask for it at your local indie bookstore or library. In case you haven’t been following along, it’s a profound, important issue, editors Tim Fab-Eme, Octavia Cade, and Priya Chand and all of us on staff and whose work appears within devoted monumental efforts to it despite adversity, fire and flood, and we really hope you get a chance to appreciate these beautiful stories, poems, essays and art on the theme of oceans and the global water cycle. Thank you so much for the enthusiastic support that made this possible.

Reckoning 6 and Our Beautiful Reward are both up for a bunch of Utopia Awards! We got seven nominations total, even more than last year, including Rimi B. Chatterjee’s “A Question of Choice” and Amanda Ilozumba’s “Rainbow Boy” for novelette, Miriam Navarro Prieto’s “Nature’s Chosen Pronouns” and Francesca Gabriele Hurtado’s “Resilience” for poetry, Sofia Ezdina’s “Wildfire, Hellfire: the Case for Siberian Globeflowers” and Amber Fox’s “Ghost of a Chance: A Trans Girl Tries to Live” for nonfiction, and Zuzanna Kwicien’s badass cover art for Reckoning 6, “A Dream I Have”.

This is all phenomenal work and we are so proud! Congratulations, everybody!

There is lots of other amazing work nominated—the world of utopian writing is expanding, not a moment too soon, and it’s wonderful to see. Please go have a look at the full list, read and behold, and consider voting?

Finally, don’t forget that Reckoning 8, edited by SM Waverly and Knar Gavin, is open and accepting submissions now through the equinox on September 22nd. We are actively reading and accepting work on the theme of activism and resistance—a bunch of amazing pieces we are super excited about just in the past few weeks. Thanks to a successful fundraiser last summer, we’ve raised pay rates all around, to 10 cents a word for prose, $50 per page for poetry and interior art, and as always we are eagerly seeking new work from queer, trans, disabled, Indigenous, Black, brown, and otherwise marginalized writers, poets and artists.

Please submit!

Reckoning 8 Submission Call

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We’re very excited to announce, for the forthcoming Reckoning 8, editors Knar Gavin and Waverly SM! Read on for their issue-specific submission call.

Reckoning is a journal of creative writing on environmental justice; we’re looking for fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, poetry and art.

For Reckoning 8, we want thinking, writing and art about … this. All of this, right now. We want to hear about active resistance to the patriarchofascist, corporate-captured extractive state. Show us what it means that in order to build Cop City*, a massive facility intended to train a new generation of lethal enforcers into an institution directly descended from slave patrols, the state of Georgia and its actors must first level a forest and label protestors “domestic terrorists” as a precursor to murdering them. Help us understand how strategies of repression and control all over the world concentrate agency in the hands of the few at the expense of all other life. We are looking for work in opposition to a broad, insidious fascism that treats water, trees, and bodies as exploitable, expendable resources rather than sacred, essential components of our global, infinitely interconnected and interdependent web of life.

As always, we’re seeking work from people of all genders or none, all sexualities or none, of all neurotypes, all levels of physical ability, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, in all parts of the world. We’d love to add all languages to that, though we publish in English and are currently limited to reading submissions for potential translation in Spanish, French and Swedish.

Payment is 10 cents/word, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork. We don’t charge submission fees.

We’re always open to submissions. Deadline for Reckoning 8 is the solar equinox, September 22, 2023.

Read the full guidelines and submit!

Further Reading

Recommendations from Reckoning editors and staff

Special Submission Call: Our Beautiful Reward [Closed]

“…the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin

The call for submissions for Our Beautiful Reward, a special online issue of Reckoning Magazine, is closed as of September 1, 2022.

The fall of Roe V Wade in the U.S. has codified dramatic restrictions on the right of pregnant individuals to make their own reproductive choices. In the U.S. and internationally, we are also witnessing an increase in already significant levels of hostility against trans and genderqueer bodily self-determination. These struggles for basic bodily autonomy are linked, and find common grounding in the pursuit of joy, flourishing, care and safety.

Likewise, the pursuit of joy, flourishing, care and safety requires that we fight for a sustainable world within which chosen families of all kinds can exist and tend to one another. With a deep sense of the urgency of the moment, Reckoning invites you to imagine this world, and the roles that bodily autonomy and bodily self-determination play in both creating and inhabiting it. We will read submissions of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction for the special online issue through the end of August 2022. Ebook release date will be October 16, 2022, with content appearing weekly online thereafter. Amazing cover artwork by Mona Robles (of Reckoning 1 and Creativity and Coronavirus fame) coming soon.

We’ll be paying professional rates as always, and the regular submission call for the ocean-themed Reckoning 7, edited by Octavia Cade, Tim Fab-Eme and Priya Chand, will remain open for the duration.

Submit your work here!     Read the full guidelines here.

Note: we previously had Moksha set to throttle so everyone could only have one submission at a time. I’ve relaxed that so folks can submit to Reckoning 7 and Our Beautiful Reward simultaneously! —Michael

Reckoning 7 Guidelines: Poetry

Fela Kuti’s ‘Water No Get Enemy’ is one of my favorite songs about life, and it’s echoing in my head as I think about Reckoning 7. The Afrobeat maestro warns humans not to war with water, because we cook and wash with it, we drink it, and clean both the newborn and the dead with it. In other words, water is life; only those who want to die trouble it, and that’s exactly what we’re doing now. We seem to forget that Earth is two thirds aquatic ecosystems that stabilize the global climate and sustain life. We increasingly unsettle water bodies with our spills, plastics, and the additional stressor of warmer temperatures that drive extreme events like floods, droughts, and wildfires.

Human activities invade species, shrinking biodiversity and engendering extinction. So, let’s sing about crests, let’s sing about atolls, let’s sing about seaward slopes. What’s beauty if not Rainbow Reef, Grand Central Station Chimneys, Great Barrier Reef, and Andaman Sea Reef? What else is beauty? But don’t worry if your work isn’t about oceans, aquifers and springs, rivers and streams, wetlands, bays, and estuaries. Water has no enemy; it’s life, and if you’ve written a poem about environmental justice please send it my way.

Payment for poetry is $30 (US) per page and there are no fees to submit.

Read the full guidelines and submit!

Reckoning 7 Guidelines: Nonfiction

Someone throws out a plastic bag, maybe intentionally or maybe lost on the wind in a moment when they aren’t paying attention, and now there’s plastic in the Mariana Trench.1 Meanwhile, horseshoe crabs evolved a compound to resist infection, and now their blood ensures millions of vaccine doses are safe every year, though at the cost of their own health as a species.2

No matter what we’re trying to get—easier access to electricity, delicious food, a nice day out—nothing happens in a vacuum. Our actions have consequences, both positive and negative, that ripple across the system regardless of intent. So what does happen when we pay attention to the whole, rather than only the parts that are immediately visible? What effects do we learn to look out for, and what unanticipated surprises change the way we think about the impact of our actions? Consider food webs, niches, and global currents—but don’t stop there. A novel perspective is the most valuable of all.

While a connection to watery ecosystems is preferable, it is not required; we do expect a connection to environmental justice. References are appreciated where relevant, in no particular format—this call is for creative rather than academic or journalistic nonfiction.

Payment for nonfiction is 8 cents (US) per word and there are no fees to submit.

Read the full guidelines and submit!

 

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/plastic-bag-found-bottom-worlds-deepest-ocean-trench/

2. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/crash-a-tale-of-two-species-the-benefits-of-blue-blood/595/