Boyfriend Village is Black Warrior Review’s online edition, released once and sometimes twice a year. 

BWR Online: Boyfriend Village

Black Warrior Review is seeking submissions of all genres for our tenth edition of Boyfriend Village: the Playground Boyfriend.
For many of us, the playground is where we first act out dominant societal institutions: performing weddings, playing house, or building business empires from woodchips. However, the playground is also where the boundaries of those institutions can dissolve entirely. Yes, the wedding is still on, but today, the brides are both mermaid horses with ice powers. The playground is space for experimenting with possibility. How high can you swing? How dizzy can you make yourself? If the jump skins your knee today, will it do the same tomorrow? This ground is where discovery happens, where exploration runs reckless, where rules can be more than broken; they can be thrown out entirely. We all love work which surprises the audience, but when does the artist surprise themself? Playground Boyfriend seeks art which embraces play, whether that be through wordplay and constraint, a spiritual release of control, a refusal to settle in one genre, a commitment to silliness, radical acts of imagination, or digging wormful holes in the dirt.
In most spaces, it isn’t proper to play. Play is treated as a luxury, a distraction, an unnecessary accessory to adult existence. Playground Boyfriend begs to disagree and argues that play is a vital mode of accessing what could be, and that work which plays can explore all stages of life. On the playground, there is room to move wildly without the bounds of itineraries, rules, or conventions of the restrictive here and now. Play towards a realized queer futurity, imagine the potential for new worlds, unshackle your art from all traces of colonialism, heteronormativity, or hyperindividualism—build a playground divorced from so-called reality. Bring Playground Boyfriend your disobedient grammars, your funky mix, your improper, your bold and wise. Leap from monkey bar to cumulus cloud, tongue out to gravity.
Playground Boyfriend invites you to disrespect authority, smash borders, make up the rules, turn office buildings to jungle gyms. There is no one form of playground—though we love tire swings and seesaws as much as anyone—because anywhere can become a playground, even trees and oceans and superstores and kitchen tables and grass blades and sewer systems and housefires. Claim new grounds for creativity. Let your play sprawl. Playground Boyfriend is here, one knee pressed in the mud, offering a blue raspberry Ring-Pop in exchange for your love, your rage, your melancholy, your bittersweet. We want your anything, so long as it plays.
Submissions are open between May 15, 2026, and June 15, 2026. While themed, this is open to interpretation. If you think your boyfriend might belong in our village, please send them along!
There is one submission category for all genres. We accept fiction, poetry, nonfiction, hybrid, visual and multimedia art, as well as sound collage, video, games, and more. You may use your cover letter to tell us as much or as little about your work as you like.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome. Send prose pieces no longer than 6,000 words. For flash (pieces under 1,000 words), you may include up to three prose pieces in a submission. For poetry, you may send us up to five poems, with a maximum submission length of 10 pages. For graphic, audio, and visual work, if Submittable accepts the file type, so will we! Color images most welcome.
There is a $5 submission fee. Submission fees are used to pay contributors.

BWR Online: Boyfriend Village

Highlights

About