On NR 45 Theme Kink & Culture

Kanchi Sharma, EIC & Fiction Editor:

The idea for Kink and Culture did not arrive to me as theory first, but through a certain embodied friction: a ghazal layered over electronic basslines on a warm Nashville night, a Bombay sandwich served in a café thousands of miles from where it was born. Both moments were translations—familiar yet not quite. That’s what kink and culture share: they thrive in the spaces where memory collides with invention, where desire remakes tradition into something subversive and new.

Write about Kink. Kink is more than a fantasy or fetish. Kink is intimate, radical, subversive. It’s culture. It’s ritual. It’s resistance. It’s storytelling. From the coded language of desire in religious texts and folklore, to the queer spaces that reimagine pleasure as protest. Kink defies the aesthetics of perfection and curation. Kink is permission. I want you to not just about kink as a private act but kink as a cultural mirror—revealing what we repress, what we celebrate, and what we’re still learning to name.

Write about Culture. The longing for it. The appropriation of it. The restraints and freedom of it. Is there an aspect of your culture that is forgotten? A remnant that you want to resuscitate? That resuscitated you?

Write about Kink and Culture. With this theme, I’m inviting hybridity. I’m thinking of Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of hybridity as an “interstitial” space that carries the burden of the colonial experience; it is the moment of negotiation and translation between cultures, between identities, between histories. In this space, new identities and new meanings emerge, not as a repetition of the old but as something radically new and subversive.

Consider this your permission to push against boundaries—of genre, of body, of expectation. Send us fiction with tension and truth. Play with length – write micro, flash, short story, and longer short story. Play with genre, form, and content. Send us non-fiction essays that unpack the historical, political, and personal. Send us poetry that seduce, surprise, or sting. Send us translations, hybrid work, music, and visual art that give permission to not just your own voice, but also of those who come after you.

Stay tuned and watch this space for more as I invite my lovely team to share their reflections on Kink and Culture.

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Reading Periods

We consider submissions in Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Translation two times a year—September 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 500 per section (sometimes fewer) 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, flash fiction up to 1,000 words each, micro under 500 words. Please consolidate submissions in one document.

Poetry Guidelines

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

Nonfiction Guidelines

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

TRANSLATION GUIDELINES

We consider 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