MAYDAY presents new poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, cultural commentary, and visual art to an international community of readers. We publish artists that explore culture and history; politics regional and global; the past, present, and future.

First published by New American Press in 2009 and relaunched with an expanded editorial staff in 2020, MAYDAY presents new poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, cultural commentary, and visual art to an international community of readers.

MAYDAY takes its name from the international distress call derived from the phonetic French m’aider (“help me!”). Recalling William Carlos Williams’ famous remark that “it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” MAYDAY features art that compels our attention by virtue of its urgency, something we find there that sustains us, excites us, reveals new ways of being and knowing in a complex and ever-changing world.

While MAYDAY is a literary magazine, we recognize that great literature has often been genre literature. We publish artists that explore culture and history; politics regional and global; the past, present, and future. Send us writing that surprises us, introduces images and ideas in new and strange ways, that complicates our perspectives. Send us fiction, poetry, personal essays, translations, reviews, visual art, and cultural criticism that have achieved a balance of craft and story so compelling that we cannot look away. We must read more.

We welcome writers working in English or in translation anywhere in the world, especially those who have been marginalized historically, including writers of color, queer and trans writers, disabled writers, and others who have suffered systemic discrimination.

MAYDAY nominates for The Best of the Net, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, and the Pushcart Prize.

Navel-gazing highly encouraged. These mags are actively seeking personal essays & narrative nonfiction.

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Online publications putting forward exceptional short stories for Best of the Net.

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Digital publications advancing very short fiction for Best of the Net consideration.

Flash Fiction Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

Identifies publications that put forward outstanding online work for this respected digital anthology established in 2006.

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Digital publications nominating outstanding essays and creative nonfiction for Best of the Net.

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Poetry Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

MAYDAY

The sphere of nonfiction is vast, and we appreciate and welcome its many modes. While we are especially drawn to essays that work in hybrid, braided, and experimental forms, that are transgressive in structure and approach, what we look for above all is strength of voice and a strong narrative arc. We’re into the personal that’s critical and the critical that’s personal; we want new lenses on our spectacles, even if briefly. 
Tell us a really good story about growth and connection with something larger; get us hooked on specificities; demonstrate to us how you’ve landed in a different place by the end of the piece. Show us something we see every day, but with an unexpected perspective. Make it memorable. Make it strange.
Before submitting, please have a look at our recently published nonfiction on MAYDAY’s website to get a sense of what we publish. In your cover letter please include a short bio of 100 words or less. We prefer submissions that do not exceed 5,000 words.
Please type and double-space your submission. We prefer .doc and .docx files, but .rtf, and Open Office files are okay, too. Please do not upload .pdf files. Please only send one submission at a time.

Nonfiction

MAYDAY: BLACK

General call

Thanks for considering MAYDAY as a home for your fiction. We are interested in original and engaging literary short fiction. We love innovative, strong writing that trusts the reader and is true to its author regardless of genre. We are committed to featuring a diverse range of content and authors, including LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and international voices. 
We will carefully consider works of prose up to 3000 words. Please only send one full-length submission at a time or up to three flash fiction submissions, under 1,000 words each.

Fiction

Flash Fiction

The MAYDAY Culture section is looking for enthusiastic, incisive cultural commentary and critical analysis. With an emphasis on diverse or marginalized perspectives, Culture explores politics, race, gender, sexuality, and ability across all forms of art: literature, cinema, television, music, art, theatre, etc. We want arts criticism that's exciting, energetic, and fresh. Please avoid academic style and tone. No footnotes! There's no minimum length, but we prefer submissions with fewer than 6,000 words. Please send only one Culture submission at a time. All Culture submissions will be edited before publication. In submitting, you agree that, if your piece should be accepted, the editors will revise your work before it will be published. MAYDAY pays $20 per article. Payment issued upon publication. We accept pitches, too! Review our editors’ statements below, and feel free to pitch to us via email. Clement Obropta is interested in pitches for enthusiastic and incisive arts criticism and theory, especially focusing on film, television, video games, and music. Lisa Ströhm Winberg is interested in pitches that center around visual art, semiotics in design, and fashion as an art form. Lisa is especially interested in pitches about fashion theories and visual analysis of photography.

Culture

We are looking for pieces that deserve a broader audience, that excite and inspire, that honor cultural heritage and move in the liminal space between borders sketched on maps with shaky hands; pieces that encourage a reader to question and engage with the world around them. We are especially interested in contemporary work from living authors, though it's by no means a requirement. 

 
Poetry and prose from any language translated to English will be considered. We are also interested in book reviews and essays relevant to the art of literary translation. Please include a brief translator's note if you would like to provide context, artist bio, or other information important to the submitted piece. Before submitting, please ensure that your piece is thoroughly proofread and revised the way you’d like to see it published.

  The translator must have secured rights for the translations submitted. We do not accept original text or translations that were prepared using generative AI.

 
Please include both the original and the translated text in Word files. If the source text contains characters difficult for Word to present correctly, a PDF scan is fine.

Translation (no fee submission)

“More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees – those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting, and internet publishing industries – are non-Hispanic whites.” (Pew Research) 

 


 
This segregation drives and ensures a standard of media production that fails spectacularly to capture and reflect the experiences, ideas, and interests of Black people in America. 
At MAYDAY:Black, the Black writer's voice and story are invited, encouraged, supported, and prioritized. 
Passionate to disrupt this long-time, strategic, and exclusionary media practice, Carla Bell, founding director of MAYDAY:Black, set out to honor and elevate stories written by, for, and about Black people – a fresh experience for all readers, and certainly for Black writers, including those seeking first-time publication. 
We welcome nonfiction work in opinions and analyses; personal, braided, and reported essays in contemporary and historical contexts. 
See representative stories in the January 6th Capitol Attack and Insurrection, inequities in Boston public schools, or The Black Manifesto. 
Bring your authentic, curious, courageous, well-rounded stories on life, living, love, loss, representation, race, racism, death, dying, Black plight and civil rights, neighborhood blight, gentrification, white flight, and more. (In no way is this an exhaustive list!)
Send your MD:B story draft  (800 to 3,000 words) via Submittable at no cost from anywhere in the world. English only, please.

MAYDAY:Black

What to submit:
Please submit 1 - 3 poems totaling no more than 10 pages in a single document. Submissions of more than 3 poems or 10 pages will not be read. We aim to respond to submissions within six months; please do not submit again until hearing back on your first submission.
In lieu of a cover letter, include a bio of up to 100 words in the appropriate field, as well as any social media handles where indicated in the Submittable form. 
By submitting, you confirm that the work is your own and has not been previously published. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, please message us via Submittable immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. 
If your work speaks to the knowledge or experience of a marginalized group, and you would like to contextualize your relationship to that group, you may do so within your cover letter.
What we’re looking for:
At MAYDAY, we want to publish poems that teach us their language and how to read them. We seek to cultivate a poetry section that moves readers through the expressive and fresh–the weird yet intentional. We value subversive poems that engage critically with the world, that are specific yet embrace the mess of complexity. We want poems that make us laugh, poems that make us cry, and those that manage both. We enjoy poems that invite readers to connect with their speakers, and leave us transformed by the poet’s voice. We want poems that engage in or break received forms and those that create new ones. We’d love to see poetry that uses space imaginatively, including projective, concrete, visual, erasure, and documentary forms, as well as forms we haven’t seen yet! Show us what a poem can be and do. Send us your best. 
The following are some poems we’ve been proud to publish within the past year. We encourage you to take a gander at them before submitting:

  Kelsey L. Smoot, "Two Poems"
  antmen pimentel mendoza, "Two Poems"
  Mitali Khanna Sharma, "Ghazal for Valley Girl"
  Raquel Gutiérrez, "Pure Deseo"
  Tyler Raso, "Two Poems"
  Catherine Chen, "Spirit Article"
 

Book Reviews 
We are interested in rigorous, interdisciplinary yet artistic and playful book reviews of recent poetry and hybrid collections. For an example of what we might be looking for, check out our poetry editor's recent review here. 
 
We are particularly interested in seeing book reviews of the below poetry collections, though we are still open to reviews of other titles:
Error, David Greenspan (antiphony, 2024)
Ossia, Jimin Seo (Changes, 2024)\
Not Us Now, Zoë Hitzig (Changes, 2024)
A Night in the Country, Laura Newbern (Changes, 2024)
The Grid, Eli Payne Mandel (Changes, 2023)
Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black (Copper Canyon, 2024)
The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (Black Ocean, 2024)
The Sisters, Jordan Windholz (Black Ocean, 2024)
Risk, Rusty  Morrison (Black Ocean, 2024)
Just Like, Lee Sumyeong (Black Ocean, 2024
Biologicity, Shin Hae-uk (Black Ocean, 2024)
The Odd Month, Valeria Meiller (Black Ocean, 2024)
Wail Song, Chaun Webster (Black Ocean, 2023)
It’s Not Over Once You Figure it Out, Isaac Pickell (Black Ocean, 2023)
Seguiriyas, Ben Meyerson (Black Ocean, 2023)
Interior Landscape, Mitra Rosenberg (ugly duckling presse, 2023)
WORDTOMYDEAD, sade powell (ugly duckling presse, 2023)
Girl Work, Zefyr Lisowski (Noemi Press, 2024)
Beautiful Machine Woman Language, Catherine Chen (Noemi Press, 2023)
a record of how the mother’s textile became sound, Nawal Nader-French (Noemi Press, 2023)
Occupy Whiteness, Joaquin Zihuatanejo (Deep Vellum, 2024)
Watcha,  Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (Deep Vellum, 2024)
Return of the Chinese Femme, Dorothy Chan (Deep Vellum, 2024)
Portal, Tracy Fuad (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Asterism, Ae Hee Lee (Tupelo Press, 2024)
The Future Will Call You Something Else, Natasha Saje (Tupelo Press, 2023)
The Wandering Life, Yves Bonnefory/Hoyt Rogers (Tupelo Press, 2023)
Wind-Mountain-Oak, Sappho, tr. Dan Beachy-Quick (Tupelo Press)
Mandible Wishbone Solvent, Asiya Wadud (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Negro Mountain, C.S. Giscombe (Omnidawn, 2024)
The Upstate, Lindsay Turner (Omnidawn, 2024)
Letters from the Black Ark, D.S. Marriott (Omnidawn, 2024)
Underscore, Julie Carr (Omnidawn, 2024)
Whosoever Whole, Elizabeth Scanlon (Omnidawn, 2024)
Godhouse, Ruth Ellen Kocher (Omnidawn, 2023)
Black Box Syndrome, Jose-Luis Monteczuma (Omnidawn, 2023)
Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking, Truong Tran and Damon Potter (Omnidawn, 2023)
Fish-Wife, Alysse Kathleen McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)
In the Tempered Dark, ed. Lisa Fay Coutley (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)
The Everyday Life of Design, Alan Gilbert (Winter Editions, 2024)
Fires Seen from Space, Betsy Fagin (Winter Editions, 2024)
Transcendental Factory, Karla Kelsey (Winter Editions, 2024)
Postcards from the Siege of Leningrad, ed. Polina Barskova (Winter Editions, 2024)
Start Anywhere, Michael Kasper (Winter Editions, 2024)
The Gone Thing, Monica McClure (Winter Editions, 2023)
Border Wisdom, Ahmad Almallah (Winter Editions, 2023)
Via, Claire DeVoogd (Winter Editions, 2023)
Boys Fight, Marina Tëmkina & Michel Gérard (Winter Editions, 2024)
You, Rosa Alcala (Coffee House Press, 2024)
Alt-Nature, Saretta Morgan (Coffee House Press, 2024)
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Daniel Borzutzky (Coffee House Press, 2024)
Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy (Princeton University Press, 2023)

MAYDAY

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