Please review these guidelines before submitting. A submission form can be found at the end of this page.

We do not wish to place limits on your imagination or creativity, but there are some constraints in what we can publish at this time. Your contribution should be original, submitted digitally, and reproducible on a website, as this our current publishing medium. While at the moment we are looking for shorts and welcome incomplete and unfinished work, your submission should be able to stand on its own.

Please send us no more than three distinct pieces per submission. We will not consider any more than three at a time.

Text submissions should not exceed 750 words each. Non-text submissions should be similarly short. Audio and video files should not exceed 5 minutes in length. While we will show some flexibility on length limits, this should not be taken as an invitation to disregard our guidelines.

All submissions should be accompanied by a cover letter and a bio. Upon acceptance, we will require a photo of the contributor.

Please submit all text as a Word (.doc or .docx) or Open Document (.odt) file. If your submission has precise formatting, you may also submit it as a PDF, but we still want a copy of it as an editable file. Image files should be sent as PNG or high-quality JPEGs unless a specific other format is necessary. Audio files should be MP3 or MP4, and video files should be MP4.

We welcome multilingual and non-English texts, but please specify the language(s) that you are using and, if possible, provide us with an English translation (for review purposes only). If you are submitting a translation of somebody else’s original work, then you must affirm that the translation is your own and that you have the permission of the original creator and the original publisher, if applicable, to submit your translation for publication. A copy of the original must accompany your translation. Accepted translations will be published alongside the original. Text submissions that include characters in non-Latin alphabets must be accompanied by a PDF file to ensure accuracy.

The contributor confirms that the work(s) submitted for print and/or online is/are their own, the contributor owns the copyright(s), the work(s) are not in violation or infringement of any existing copyright(s) or license(s), and the work(s) submitted have not been previously published elsewhere. We will consider work that has been posted on the contributor’s personal website or social media accounts, but you must provide us with all such links for our review along with your submission. Upon acceptance, we will ask you to remove or deactivate such posts or convert them to links to our website.

Creating Utopias acquires Digital Rights for accepted work(s) for its online publication on our website, where they will remain published until or unless they are removed at our discretion. We also retain the non-exclusive right to re-publish accepted work(s) in a print anthology.

The contributor agrees to not publish accepted work in any other publication or site for three months following publication at Creating Utopias, and to credit (with a link if possible) Creating Utopias as the original publisher whenever and wherever the work is reprinted or reproduced.

We reserve the right to revise or edit accepted work before publication, subject to the contributor’s approval, not to be unreasonably withheld. In the event such revisions and/or edits are declined, we reserve the right to withdraw our acceptance of the work.

We consider simultaneous submissions, but please let us know that you are also submitting elsewhere in your cover letter. You must notify us immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

We regret that we cannot provide any compensation for accepted work at this time.

Send us your submissions via the following form, with your cover letter and your bio in the body of the message. Each piece that you are submitting should be in its own file, and the filename should have the format [Lastname-Firstname-Title of Work]. There is a 10mb limit for the first two files and 5mb limit for the third file. Zipped files will not be accepted.
Please allow up to 60 days for us to get back to you before you inquire about the status of your submission.
By submitting to Creating Utopias you consent to your email being added to our mailing list.

If you have issues with the submission form please contact us via email to contribute@creatingutopias.org