Welcome to Chautauqua’s Submittable portal!

Thank you for your interest in our journal!

In 2024, Chautauqua Institution celebrates its 150th anniversary—and to honor and celebrate this milestone, Chautauqua seeks poetry, nonfiction, short stories, and flash that explore and celebrate the Chautauqua spirit—the ways in which we are rooted and rising, making our way in the world, appreciating its beauty, engaging with others, looking outward and upward. 

In your cover letter, please mention how Chautauqua Institution or its values have intersected your life. 

All life is rooted—in places, in memory, in our shared experiences, in our pasts, our families, our relationships. Where we begin can have a tremendous effect on where we are going and how we get there. Sometimes we are uprooted unexpectedly. Sometimes we make the difficult choice to uproot ourselves or prune unhealthy branches to grow stronger.  Imagine all the seeds—actual and metaphoric—settling down in a space that allows inevitable growth, setting down roots before the great unfurling.  

And, so it is in our lived experiences. Seasons come and go. Days become weeks. Weeks, years. All of those histories pieced together is a large mosaic—a perpetual enduring mosaic of relationships, history, human complexity. 

Art, spirituality, education, leisure—Chautauqua Institution’s four pillars challenge us to find and to be our best selves. Some days we face ugliness and sorrow. Other days we celebrate beauty and joy. And the many days between, we live our lives and imagine the possibilities. Always we are rooted. Always we are rising and growing. 

We invite you to share with us poems, essays, short stories, and flash that capture the Chautauqua aesthetic, experience, philosophy.  

In your cover letter, please mention how Chautauqua Institution or its values have intersected your life. 

We will publish two issues—an online issue in December 2023 and a print issue in June of 2024. 

Submission periods: February 15 to March 15 and September 1 to September 30. 

If you are considering submitting to Chautauqua, 

please consider ordering a back issue in print ((https://www.chautauquabookstore.com/shop/books/writers-center ) 

or viewing on our online issues (https://chautauquajournal.wixsite.com/website). 

You will get a thorough feel for the kind of writing we love—and, clearly, what we publish.