University of Alabama

Established in 1974 by graduate students in the MFA in Creative Writing, Black Warrior Review is named for the river that borders the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. BWR publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and art twice a year, + an annual online issue.

Established in 1974 by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, Black Warrior Review is named for the river that borders the campus of The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. 

The city, the river, and the magazine all derive their names from the 16th-century Indigenous leader Tuskaloosa (also spelled “Tushkalusa”), whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—tasca, meaning “warriors,” and lusa, meaning “black.” In 1540, Tuskaloosa battled the Spanish colonizer Hernando de Soto at Mabila, a fortified settlement perhaps in the vicinity of present-day Selma. 

Tuskaloosa was likely among the thousands who perished in the resistance effort, which is thought to have stopped the advance of de Soto’s campaign.

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Want to check out our previous crowdsourced themed lists? We've un-paywalled them for you guys, so get them before they're gone.
Part 1: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/cool_kids_3
Part 2: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/Cool_kids_2
Part 3: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/cool_kids_pt3
Part 4: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/cool_kids_4

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Black Warrior Review

Black Warrior Review Flash Contest

Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest

Black Warrior Review Contest

Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest

We seek art, comics, and visual narratives of all forms that are as engaged as they are engaging. We want your work that refuses to look away from the moment we are publishing into right now, work that witnesses, that reconfigures, that radically reimagines what is and what might be. We accept submissions of single or multiple works that all together total no more than six pages, though due to our print format space is limited, and we are only able to print in greyscale at this time. We also encourage submissions of work that is multidimensional and/or not primarily page-based—textiles, collages, sculptures, blueprints, installations, and more are all actively encouraged, and we are happy to accept photographed submissions as needed. If it can exist on the space of the page in any form, feel free to send it (or to email design.bwr@gmail.com if you have questions!)

Comics and Art

For this submission period, we’re looking for stories about communities. So many stories are about ‘I,’ and ‘me.’ This is your opportunity to tell a story about ‘us.’ Bring us your queer found families, your singing cities, your alien hive-minds, your villages, temples, tribes, unions, cults, co-ops, dance floors, and every other ‘us’ you can imagine. We accept pieces of up to 6,000 words, but please keep in mind we are a print journal with limited physical space. ‘Us’ is not a neutral term. We aren’t seeking ‘us’ in the hopes of defining a ‘them.’ In the face of climate disaster and settler colonialism, what connects an ‘us?’ This is likewise not a venue for the collapsing of an us into a single dimension. Communities are never one thing. Where is there disagreement in an ‘us?’ When is ‘us’ too much, or not enough? BWR welcomes the polyvocal, the mish-mash, and the speculative. If you’re not sure you fit, don’t self-reject; send it in! Who knows; maybe you and us are a we?

Fiction General Submission

Nonfiction can, and should be, uncertain of itself. We should be wary of anything that claims it knows the truth, the whole truth, the capital T “Truth.”
We want alternate versions of the story. The one you believe, the one that’s true, the one you want to be true. How your beloved’s tell the story differently—or how they would tell it differently. We want your speculation, your “maybe”s, your “absolutely”s, your “never”s, and we want them all with a grain of salt. We want to know where your memory fails, where you believe it’s unequivocally correct, where you have room for multiple realities. Most importantly, we want to know why you believe what you believe, why you don’t want to, why you can’t. 
We want to know the truths and lies you tell yourself and the ones the world has told you. Western science, medicine, and history have used their versions of the capital T “Truth” to control and silence people for centuries. We want work that examines how these lies came to be, how they continue to scapegoat and divide us. In a world where marginalized histories are erased from textbooks and unfounded science is promoted by our government to further disenfranchise and erase us, confront these lies and tell us the truth. Call them out. 
Bring us your messy truths, your unabashed lies, your I-don’t-know’s, and everything in between. Make us question reality. While we would love to publish your longer work, we only have so much space in our journal, so please limit your submissions to 4000 words.

Nonfiction General Submission

We believe poetry is spiritual. We believe poetry is history. It evokes the emotional and physical spaces we have traveled before, and the possibilities of the future and the pangs in the present. Poetry is the history of words; poetry reminds us how much has happened and how much has changed.
We are interested in poems that explore the history of things and place, poems that interrogate the personal and how the colonial and postcolonial histories are embedded in the body, the tongue, the tree, the cushion, the roof, and the land and by history, what has changed through this history and what is their influence in the present.
The lands in Congo, Palestine, Sudan, the hibakujumoku trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing, the lands in Delta State, Nigeria, The lovers of Modena, and language itself. What has changed and what has remained without change?
We are interested in poems that explore personal history, poems that explore dysfunction through the little things, poems that explore BIPOC spaces. That old chair in your mother’s room, the crack on the mug, and the dust on the note.
We are interested in experimental poems that dissect the normal, poems that explore illness, memory loss and ordinary life.
For BWR, don’t self-reject, send it our way!

Poetry General Submission

BWR seeks work that explodes, refuses, and deconstructs the boundaries of genre altogether.
We want work interested in what becomes possible when we dissolve the conventions and constraints of genre in favor of work informed by a multitude of disciplines, practices, and knowledges. Work that utilizes hybridity to engage with how genre itself is frequently both a product and a tool of capital-colonial powers and institutions, work that moves between and across and beyond genre as an active act of resistance and refusal.
In particular, we encourage work in conversation with writing/arts practices that have long been defying and working outside of singular genre categories—artmaking traditions and histories that are frequently delegitimized and dismissed by Western literary canon constructions of genre.
Send us your work that is genre-interdisciplinary, genre-multimodal, genre-expansive, genre-denying, genre-exploding, genre-transcendent, genre-undoing. If you’ve ever squinted at a piece and thought, where do I even send this, what genre even is this? Send it here!
We accept submissions of up to 10 pages, though please note that due to our print format, space is limited. In addition, at this time we are only able to publish hybrid pieces in black and white.

Hybrid General Submission

The entry fee covers one submission of up to 6,000 words. This category is for both domestic and international submissions.
Additional Information:
FICTION JUDGE: Lesley Nneka Arimah
Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Caine Prize and an O. Henry Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, United States Artists and MacDowell. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her  debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the  2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. She lives in Minneapolis and is working on a novel about you.

Fiction Contest (Domestic and International)

The entry fee covers one submission of up to 6,000 words. This category is for both domestic and international submissions.
Additional Information:
NONFICTION JUDGE: Melissa Faliveno
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the novel  Hemlock and the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful,  and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from  the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work, which has been nominated  for a Pushcart Prize and received notable selection in Best American Essays, has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman and Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, Melissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University  of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill. www.melissafaliveno.com

Nonfiction Contest (Domestic and International)

The entry fee covers one submission of up to 6,000 words. This category is for both domestic and international submissions.
Additional Information:
POETRY JUDGE: Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics  2022). Martyr! (Knopf 2024), Kaveh’s first novel, was a New York Times  Bestseller and one of the NYT’s Ten Best Books of the Year. Martyr! was also the 2024 recipient of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the  Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a 2024 Discover Prize Finalist, and a 2024  National Book Award Finalist. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in Iowa. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Black Warrior Review

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