Welcome to Chautauqua’s Submittable portal!
Chautauqua is delighted to announce that Kwame Alexander has joined the team. He and Jill Gerard will lead the editorial team.
In addition, we are happy to announce that in 2025, we will shift directions just slightly and will be presenting Chautauqua as an annual anthology.
Submissions will open February 15 and remain open to the end of March--with one caveat. If a category fills up, we will pause submissions to allow the team to read.
The theme for 2025: Anthology Call: America as Patchwork Quilt
As Chautauqua looks to 2025, we invite you to explore what it means to be American or to live in this land?
Through various roads, paths, and networks, people become American. Some have always been here. Some people didn’t “come” to America, but were stolen, forced here. Others came looking for opportunity. Some walked endless miles to cross borders seeking refuge. No matter, we settle and make a life. We carry with us things that are important parts of our identity—food and drink, beliefs and traditions, art, commerce, sport, leisure. And hope.
We build a community. It shapes us just as we shape it. The ancestors, the generations before us, the history of the country all have a hand in molding us.
Some find a place that feels welcoming, and others find hardness and challenge. We become warp and weft, provide structure and texture, feel the pull and the push, the stitching and unstitching of our humanity.
We invite you to “say it plain,” as Langston Hughes wrote, to sing your America. Submit your poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, micro-essay, and flash fiction that explores what it means to live in America, to be American.
Please include with your submission a bio to 75 words, email and mailing addresses, and any comment you would like to make regarding your submission and the 2025 theme.
This submission portal is for Young Voices--writers in middle and high school, ages 12 through 18. Submissions must include a cover note by a teacher, mentor, or parent as well as an email address for that person. Please identify either a school or writing program that the author attends or participates in. This can go in the cover letter portion of the submission, along with the student's bio.
Submissions may include nonfiction (1500 word limit), fiction (1500 word limit), poetry (1 to 3 poems) or flash (up to 750 words). For prose pieces, please identify as fiction or nonfiction.
We are seeking essays that value exact and artful use of language and syntax as well as a compelling emotional experience that includes the reader, whatever the subject matter. The best essay is timeless, released from daily headlines but important for its truthful evocation of the world.
Creative Nonfiction should be a maximum of 25 double-spaced, single-sided pages in 12-point font, no extra spaces between paragraphs and all pages numbered—or about 7,000 words.
A Chautauquq short story, self-contained novel excerpt, or short short demonstrates a sound storytelling instinct, using suspense in the best sense of creating a compulsion in the reader to continue reading—because of deep interest in the characters and their actions, unsettled issues of action or theme, or in some cases sheer delight at the language itself. A superior story will exhibit the writer’s attention to language—both in nuance and detail—and reveal a masterful control of syntax.
Fiction should be a maximum of 25 double-spaced, single-sided pages in 12-point font, no extra spaces between paragraphs and all pages numbered—or about 7,000 words.
The editors actively solicit writing, regardless of genre, that expresses the values of Chautauqua Institution: meaningful inquiry into questions of personal, social, political, spiritual, and aesthetic importance. The qualities we seek include a mastery of craft, attention to vivid and accurate language, a true lyric “ear,” an original and compelling vision, and strong narrative instinct. Above all, we value work that is intensely personal, yet somehow implicitly comments on larger public concerns—work that answers every reader’s most urgent question: Why are you telling me this?
PLEASE BE SURE TO MARK AS FLASH FICTION, MICRO ESSAY, OR PROSE POEM. THANKS!
You may include up to three flash pieces in a single file. Each should be no longer than 750 words.
A Chautauqua poem is not just a pretty exercise in language. It exhibits the writer’s craft and attention to language, employs striking images and metaphors, and engages the mind as well as the emotions. It emerges from the poet’s deep reading and knowledge of poetic tradition, reacting to that tradition to reveal a definite aesthetic approach, opening insights into the larger world of human concerns. This may include traditional or experimental work, but each poem should be meaningful to a smart reader beyond the writer’s private code of expression.
Submit a maximum of three poems, typed single-spaced, justified left, saved in a single document.