Submissions
Ciao! Submissions closed as of April 15. Thank you for work! You will be hearing from us shortly. All accepted work is published on a rolling basis within the next 1 to 3 months.
Submission details
We are impartial to poetry that makes delicious use of language. Play. Wildness. We like the lush, ornate, verbose. We like splendor—with heart. Baroque, substantive, hungry. We love ourselves a juicy prose poem. We are in the “anything can be a poem” camp. Lineation must be thoughtful.
We are open to everything, but we have a yearning for poems about place/country, rooms and spaces that you’ve left behind, obsessions, the ghosts that haunt you, fathomless desire, and disability (particularly, we are interested in dialogic works between body and self).
We are more interested in HOW a poem expresses itself than WHAT it is expressing. For example: You write a deeply personal poem on a topic that means something to you. We are more invested in how you explore this than the emotional sentiment expressed. While we can appreciate your story, we must also love your voice and execution.
As always, we deeply encourage LGBTQIA, BIPOC, low-income, and emerging writers to submit their work. We encourage current and former foster youth to submit. We are not interested in only publishing work about your experience as a marginalized person; we welcome and encourage all of your work, no matter the topic. Tokenism is not our idea of diversity or inclusion. We welcome all writers; we don’t care whether you have an MFA or not.
Submit a third-person bio.
Translated works (where English + [insert language] are included together) are welcome!
NOTE: Our site width is fairly narrow. Poems with very wide-set borders may need to be reconfigured or published as images if they cannot lineate properly on our site.
Calls for submissions will be posted here as well as on our Twitter and Instagram. You may find calls for submissions on our editor’s socials, as well (ig: @lisamariebasile twitter: @lisamariebasile).
Style: Before submitting your work, we urge you to read through recent work to get a sense of our taste. We love the lush, the experimental, the vulnerable, the baroque, the wild. We love hybridity. We love the strange and sibylline. Bring us to the underworld. Bring us to life. We want gilding and putrid lemons and afternoon light and dreamscape diary entries and the full spectrum of the human heart. We desire thoughtful lineation and bursting prose poems and a sense of musicality.
Particulars: We sincerely regret that we cannot publish most of what is submitted to us, as we have very limited bandwidth. If you are curious about the status of a submission, resist DMing our editor on her personal social media channels. Send an email. You will hear from us, even if we’re slow.
If your work is accepted for publication, note that we publish on a rolling basis. There are no issues and no set dates. Upon acceptance, your work will generally go up within a month or two and we’ll let you know an estimate around when you can expect your work to go live; we kindly ask for flexibility around this.
In the interest of radical transparency, you should note that our editor has a job and manages an unpredictable chronic illness. So, we are slower than we used to be when it comes to publishing. Luna Luna is a space of love and devotion to the writing community. We so appreciate your understanding, love, and patience.
Please read all of the fine print below before submitting.
WE HAVE A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY for racist, sexist, xenophobic, body-shaming, ableist, ageist, homophobic, transphobic, white supremacist people or their work. We will tell you to fuck off, and then we'll hex your ass. If we find that someone has behaved in a way that is not in line with our editorial policy, we reserve the right to remove their work.
SUBMISSIONS are always free. We’re happy to accept simultaneous submissions, too. Just let us know!
Some of the topics we love to read include:
Work from current and former foster youth
Pieces about culture, race, family, lineage
Folk magic
Literary personal essays
Baroque poetry
Hybrid work (we REALLY love hybrid work)
Pieces about ritual, divination, astrology, and magic
Interviews & book reviews
Explorations of disability and chronic illness
Poetics of home/place/room/house/space
Limit your pieces about the moon, please; we know our name is Luna Luna, but it’s too on the nose.
SUBMISSION SPECIFICS.
Always include a third-person author/professional bio.
SHARING YOUR WORK
If published, quotes from your work may appear on our Instagram, Twitter, or other social channels for promotion.
RIGHTS
Writers keep copyright, but Luna Luna requests that you a) ask us for permission before republishing your content. If it is republished, please make sure the second publication provides credit and a backlink, indicating that Luna Luna Magazine was the first to publish. Also, we do honor un-publish requests.
IMAGES
Most of our posts feature Unsplash (free to use) images.
PAYMENT
We are not able to pay contributors. We are 100% volunteer-run. Please know that we support your work and your voice, and we support you submitting elsewhere if you’d like to be paid for your work.
EDITING
We generally do not perform large-scale edits on the work we accept, but we may work with you to change a few things.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Follow us: @lunalunamag #lunalunamag