Crazyhorse welcomes general submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from September 1st through May 31st, with the exception of January 1st to January 31st, during which we only accept entries for the Crazyhorse Prizes. We also accept entries for Crazyshorts! our short-short fiction contest from July 1st through July 31st.
We ask that submissions of fiction and nonfiction are between 2,500 and 8,500 words in length. Exceptional work that falls outside this range has found a home in Crazyhorse in the past, but it is an unusual occurrence. For poetry, please submit a set of 3-5 poems.
We are happy to consider simultaneous submissions. For prose, please withdraw your work from consideration if it has been accepted elsewhere. For poetry, should any of the poems in your submission be accepted elsewhere while under consideration with Crazyhorse, please add a note to your submission to alert us that they are no longer available. Our response time is typically 16 to 36 weeks. If your work is under serious consideration, it may take longer.
We are open to all narrative styles and forms, and are always on the lookout for something we haven’t seen before. Send a story we won’t be able to forget.
Crazyhorse publishes four to six essays each year, so we call for the vey best writing, period. We believe literary nonfiction can take any form, from the letter to the list, from the biography to the memoir, from the journal to the obituary. All we call for is precision of word and vision, and that the truth of the matter be the flag of the day.
Crazyhorse aims to publish work that reflects the multiple poetries of the twenty-first century. While our taste represents a wide range of aesthetics, from poets at all stages of their writing careers, we read with a discerning eye for poems that demonstrate a rhetorical and formal intelligence—that is, poems that know why they are written in the manner that they are. We seek poems that exhibit how content works symbiotically with form, evidenced in an intentional art of the poetic line or in poems that employ or stretch lyric modes. Along with this, poems that capture our attention enact the lyric utterance through musical textures, tone of voice, vivid language, reticence, and skillful syntax. For us, overall, the best poems do not idly tell the reader how to feel or think, they engender feeling and thought in the reader.