When’s the last time you had a thrilling conversation — the kind that gets under your skin and sticks in your mind? The kind where issues of privacy or race arise and you find yourself arguing in a spirited debate, spending all evening listening to the other person, sharing your experiences, opposing their beliefs, and negotiating your own? 

And the next day, when you wake up, you realize that by disagreeing with them, you’ve created a magnetic field between the two of you, fueled by the honesty of your emotions? Now, imagine an organization that inspires the art of opposition — how friendly, how urgent, how intimate.

Publications with verse selected for America's foremost poetry anthology. These journals consistently publish poetry representing the most significant contemporary verse across styles and approaches.

Lit Mags Featured in Best American Poetry Anthologies

Journals that forward outstanding nonfiction to this respected anthology series founded in 1986. These publications identify exceptional essays that might reach the broader readership BAE provides.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for Best American Essays

BASS represents the most mainstream recognition for short fiction in America. These journals serve as the initial screening layer for potential inclusion in this widely-read collection.

Literary Mags That Nominate for Best American Short Stories

The Seventh Wave

Prior to submitting, please ensure that you have read about this program in full here, as well as visited our FAQ page here. To call out a few key details:
Four Community Anthologies. There are four Community Anthologies open for submission, each of which is curated and edited by a different editor-in-chief. Seventh Wave selected our four 2026 Editors-in-Chief through an application process in March 2026, and our EICs — named above — were selected based on the anthology topic they wished to curate and their vision for the collection. You can read more about our EICs here.
Each Community Anthology focuses on a different topic. Our four 2026 Community Anthologies are On Trash, On Friendship, On Disappearance, and On Desire. Read the calls in full here. Each Community Anthology has its own call/topic for submission, but there is only one submission form for all four (as you can only submit to one anthology per year).
Each EIC will be selecting 6-8 contributors. If you are one of the contributors selected, please note that you will be working directly with that EIC from acceptance to publication. Seventh Wave will host orientation sessions for all accepted contributors in August, and you will then work on revisions with your EIC from September through November. Please note that 3 of our 4 anthologies (as indicated in the form), are open for submissions via a hybrid submission model, meaning that the EIC is also soliciting work.
General guidelines. We only accept previously unpublished work; you may only submit to one Community Anthology per year (when you submit, you will be prompted to choose which anthology you are submitting work to); each anthology may also have specific requirements or guidelines, so please ensure you've read the calls in full here. For all prose submissions, we kindly ask that you submit within the stated word limit, double-spaced, 12-point standard serif font (no Courier, please). These requirements are not applicable to poetry or hybrid/experimental text. Any questions, please reach out to submit@seventhwavemag.com.
Payment. All contributors are paid an honorarium of $100 for their work.
In an era when we’re seeing literary magazines closing their doors, Seventh Wave is dedicated to building more platforms for our communities’ voices. Through our Community Anthologies program, we give our editorial keys to community curators, who each in turn produce their own mini, digital anthology of voice on our platforms. See our past Community Anthologies here.

The Seventh Wave

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