Fifth Wednesday Journal

Submit Your Work

Submissions for Spring 2010 closed on December 31, 2009, at midnight CST.

Guest Fiction Editor: Edie Meidav
Guest Poetry Editor: Monica Berlin
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Edie Meidav

Edie Meidav is the author of Crawl Space (FSG/Picador), The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner), and the forthcoming Steal Me (FSG). She has received for her work a Lannan Fellowship, a Bard Fiction Prize for Writers Under 40, the Kafka award for Best Novel by an American Woman, a Fulbright in Sri Lanka, and her work has been cited as an editors' pick by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Litblog Coop, The Electric Review, and elsewhere. A former director of the MFA in Writing and Consciousness at New College of California, she teaches at Bard College in New York.
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Monica Berlin

Monica Berlin's recent poems have appeared in Diagram, Rhino, Tammy, Fourteen Hills, New OrleansReview, ThirdCoast, Dislocate, Artful Dodge, The MissouriReview, and After Hours. Her critical work has been published with MLA’s Profession, Black Warrior Review, and Dalkey Archive Press. In addition to a handful of nominations for Pushcarts, she was awarded an Illinois Arts Council grant in 2005. Recently, she won the Thomas R. Hruska Memorial Nonfiction Prize from Passages North for her essay, “The Eighteenth Week,” which is forthcoming. Berlin is an Associate Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where she teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction, and serves as the Associate Director for the Program in Creative Writing

Notice: FWJ will no longer accept submissions during the months of January, February, June, and July. Submissions received in these months will NOT be opened, acknowledged, or returned. Please observe these new restrictions when submitting your work.

We accept electronic submissions in the categories of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and black-and-white photography. All submissions to Fifth Wednesday Journal must be original, unpublished work in English. We welcome simultaneous submissions with the understanding that you will inform us if your work is accepted elsewhere. We recommend that writers familiarize themselves with FWJ before submitting their work. Selections from previous issues are available for guidance at the “Inside” section on this website. Email us for information about discounted copies of back issues.

Formatting

Manuscripts must be sent as Microsoft Word .doc files or in Rich Text Format. Prose should be double-spaced, and poetry should be single-spaced. All submissions should be paginated, in 12-point type, and with at least a one-inch margin on all sides. They may be accompanied by a cover letter with the following contact information: author's name, mailing address, telephone number, and e-mail address. The e-mail address is important because we will let you know within 48 hours that your manuscript has arrived. If you do not include a cover letter, please place the contact information on the title page of the manuscript.

Submitting

Manuscripts must be submitted electronically via the form below, or on a CD sent by surface mail to:

Fifth Wednesday Journal
P. O. Box 4033
Lisle, IL 60532-9033

We will attempt to accommodate writers and photographers with special circumstances preventing them from using our electronic form or a CD.Click here to send us an e-mail or mail us a postal letter explaining the need to submit a manuscript in print form, and we will respond promptly.

DO NOT SEND PRINT MANUSCRIPTS WITHOUT FIRST NOTIFYING US.
THESE SUBMISSIONS WILL NOT BE ACKNOWLEDGED OR RETURNED.

Submission Guidelines

Click here to read the guidelines for each category of work

Response Time and Rejections

We will notify you by email within six months if we do not accept your work for publication. If you have not heard from us within this time, e-mail us. Include your name, the title of your work, the date you sent it and whether you used our online submission form or sent a CD.

DO NOT SEND E-MAIL ATTACHMENTS.
THEY WILL NOT BE OPENED OR ACKNOWLEDGED.

Rights

By submitting your work to FWJ, you indicate your consent for us to publish your work in our print journal. FWJ acquires first North American serial rights. After publication, all rights revert to the author. If we’d like to use your work in any other manner, we will contact you for permission.

Compensation & Awards

Each contributor receives two copies of the issue in which the work appears, plus all the exposure we can generate. We also award an annual Editor’s Fiction Prize, Editor’s Poetry Prize, and Editor’s Photography Prize in the amount of $100 each. All accepted submissions in these categories are eligible to win.