Reading Period for Obsidian Issue 50.1
Submit May 15–October 15, 2023 by 11:59 PM Central time (US & Canada). Unless otherwise noted, submissions sent from October 16, 2023 through May 14, 2024 will not be accepted.

Simultaneous Submissions
Simultaneous submissions to other journals are welcome as long as they are identified as such and we are notified immediately upon acceptance elsewhere.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines
• Include a short cover letter noting the title(s) of the work(s) submitted and citing major publications and awards, as well as any association or past correspondence with a guest or staff editor.
• Upload your text submission as a Word (DOC, DOCX), portable document format/PDF (PDF) or rich-text format (RTF) file. No Pages, TXT, or Open Office Documents.
• Typed, double-spaced (poetry may be single-spaced) pages.
• Numbered pages.
• Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style for grammar and MLA format for citations and works cited, when applicable.
• Margins should be set at no less than 1” and no greater than 1.5”.
• Poetry: submit up to five (5) poems totaling no more than eight (8) pages.
• Fiction, Hybrid genre: 12-point font. No more than twenty (20) pages or 5000 words (whichever is achieved first). Excerpts of longer works are welcome if self-contained.
• Drama/Performance: submit one act or a collection of short scenes no longer than twenty (20) pages following Samuel French or the Dramatists Guild suggested formatting. Excerpts of longer works are welcome if self-contained.
• Translations are welcome if permission has been granted.

• Criticism: we are not accepting any unsolicited essay manuscripts at this time. To submit a proposal, please contact the editor. 

Image Submission Guidelines
• Include a short cover letter noting the title(s) of the work(s) submitted and citing major publications and awards, as well as any association or past correspondence with a guest or staff editor.
• Submit up to five (5) images totaling no more than 15 MB.
• Upload your submission(s) as JPG or TIFF file(s) (TIFF preferred) in 300 ppi at the size(s) intended to be used (Obsidian journal is 6" x 9").  
• Specify the orientation of the image(s) as portrait or landscape.

Audio Submission Guidelines
• Include a short cover letter noting the title(s) of the work(s) submitted and citing major publications and awards, as well as any association or past correspondence.
• Submit up to five (5) sound files totaling no more than 30 MB.
• Upload your submission(s) as MP3 or WAV file(s).

Video & Media Arts Submission Guidelines
• Include a short cover letter noting the title(s) of the work(s) submitted and citing major publications and awards, as well as any association or past correspondence with a guest or staff editor.
• Submit up to three (3) video and/or gaming files totaling no more than 800 MB.
• Upload your submission(s) as M4V, MP4, MPG, AVI, or MOV files, SWF, Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), UNITY game files, and HTML5 (with or without CSS and JavaScript markup).

Restrictions
• We do not reprint previously published work.

Submitting Online
We are now accepting submissions via our online submission management system only. Submissions via postal mail or email will be discarded without response.
To submit online, please use the Obsidian submission management system, found at obsidian.submittable.com/submit. 

Notifications and Queries
Expect three to five months for a decision. Using our online submissions system you will be able to track the status of your submission. We accept queries after five months have passed. Queries should be sent via email. They should include:
• Your name.
• The date, genre, and title of the submission.
• The title of the Call for Submissions to which you are responding, if applicable.

Spam Notice
To ensure that you receive our email responses, please add staff@obsidianlit.org and notifications@email.submittable.com to your address book so that our correspondence does not end up flagged as spam. 

Contributor Copies
Upon publication, contributors receive two contributor copies of the issue.