Nashville Review seeks to publish the best work we can get our hands on, period. We hope to provide a venue for both distinguished and emerging artists. Most importantly, thank you for giving us a chance to read your work.

Reading Periods

We consider submissions in Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Translation two times a year—August and January—and typically respond within 4-5 months. We welcome submissions in Art and Comics year-round. Currently, we are not accepting unsolicited reviews or interviews.

General Guidelines

There is no fee to submit and we are proud to pay our contributors: $25 per poem and $100 for prose and art pieces.

Please do not include any personal or contact information on your manuscript. Prose pieces must be double-spaced and paginated. If your poems use white space in a nontraditional way, we recommend submitting in .pdf format. Include a brief cover letter with the title(s) of your piece(s) and a short third-person bio.

All submissions must be previously unpublished.

We encourage simultaneous submissions: if your work is accepted elsewhere, wonderful! Just leave a note via Submittable as soon as possible so we know the piece has been taken. Please submit only once per genre, per reading period, and note that we cap the number of submissions to be considered at 750 per section to ensure a reasonable response time. If we reach our submission cap before the end of the month-long reading period, submissions will close early.

Current and former (within 5 years) students and employees of Vanderbilt University are ineligible to submit.

Please visit our online submissions manager to send us your work. Submissions received via email will not be read.

For questions, please contact the Editors: thenashvillereview@gmail.com 

Fiction Guidelines

We consider short stories and novel excerpts up to 7,000 words, or three flash fiction pieces (1,000 words each) in one document.

Poetry Guidelines

We welcome submissions of 1-3 poems (10 pages total) in one document.

Nonfiction Guidelines

We’re looking for creative nonfiction across the spectrum: memoir excerpts, essays, imaginative meditations. Send up to 8,000 words.

TRANSLATION GUIDELINES

The Nashville Review is proud to include Translation as a new submission category from NR 24 onwards! In this category, we are looking for fresh contemporary writing that is currently unavailable to English-language readers—pieces that have been published in their original language, but are previously unpublished in English.

Please send prose pieces up to 8,000 words or a maximum of two poems from the same author. You must have permission from the rights holder to translate before you submit. More detailed submissions instructions can be found via our online submissions manager.

Comics Guidelines

We’re seeking anything from one-page comics to excerpts from graphic novels. Please note we do not publish single-frame cartoons in the style of The New Yorker.

Featured Artist Guidelines