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Submission Guidelines
Founded in 2009, SAND looks for submissions that push the boundaries of form, message, and voice in fresh and unpredictable ways. Take risks, experiment, and subvert expectations. We want submissions with soul, edge, and truth from a wide range of perspectives. Send us the sensitive and the rough, the enigmatic and the joyful, the unruly and the disorienting, the work unanticipated.
SAND’s diverse, international team in Berlin has long sought out and amplified fresh and underrepresented voices. We encourage submissions from a range of perspectives, especially from writers and artists who are BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, nonbinary, women, disabled, neurodivergent, working class, migrants, refugees, international, and/or geographically underrepresented.
We welcome both emerging and established creatives to submit, and we’ve worked hard to make SAND a paying market for the writers and artists we publish. We currently pay semi-professional rates which vary based on our funding.
We have a free submission option available for those who need it, and revenue from other submission fees goes directly to paying the writers and artists we publish. Our all-volunteer staff work long hours out of passion for our project and are not paid for the work we do. Without these submission fees, we could not afford to continue paying our contributors due to dramatic increases in printing and shipping costs post-pandemic.
The best way to get to know if your work is a fit for us is to read issues of SAND, read select pieces from the archives at SAND ONLINE, and explore other resources on our Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
GENERAL GUIDELINES FOR ALL GENRES
- Poetry submissions are open 10 April – 30 April 2023. We have reached our fiction submissions cap, so fiction submissions are now closed. Art submissions have been extended and are open until 7 May 2023.
- We accept previously unpublished poems, fiction, flash fiction, translations, and visual art. Creative nonfiction is not open at this time.
- Submit fiction, flash, and poetry as early as possible. There is a submissions cap on these genres to manage our all-volunteer editorial team’s time, so these genres may close early.
- We only accept work that is the creative effort of humans. SAND has long been dedicated to publishing work by diverse, international creatives whose voices need to be heard. The lived experience of being human is critical to that mission. Therefore, we are not open to work that has been fully or mostly written or generated by AI (artificial intelligence). We are open to prose and poetry that has experimented with and incorporated technology in creative ways, and we are open to digital and conceptual art that uses AI, as long as the role of AI is clearly explained in the artist statement. All submitters will be required to confirm and fully disclose the role that AI and other non-standard technologies have played in the creation of their submitted work.
- Stand-alone excerpts are acceptable (e.g. work forthcoming in a book, etc.) as long as the excerpt appears in SAND before the book’s publication date. We ask for worldwide First Serial Rights. (Rights revert to you after publication.)
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please inform us as soon as possible if the work has been accepted elsewhere.
- You may only submit once per genre, though you may submit in multiple genres.
- Please allow six months for a response before sending an inquiry.
- We pay contributors semi-professional rates which vary depending on our current funding.
- We ask past contributors to wait at least two issues before submitting again in order to ensure enough space for new voices.
POETRY GUIDELINES
- Please send us poems that take interesting risks. Your weird poems, your challenging poems, your sensitive poems. Poems unanticipated.
- We want poems that are attentive to their language; precise and economical. We would like to see specific and deliberate methods for setting the words on the page. If your work considers classical forms and uses them to new ends, send it. If it rejects traditional forms and forges new ones, we want it. Push the bounds of what is ordinarily pondered, and send the results our way.
- Submit up to 5 pages of poetry. We will not consider submissions beyond this length.
- We accept translations of poetry into English. Submitters should ensure that they have permission from the author and publisher to print the translation before submitting. (See the section on translations below.)
- Please keep in mind that our journal size is A5. Due to design considerations, prose poetry that is particularly wide is likely to undergo some spatial shifts during the editing process.
- There is a cap on poetry submissions, and this category might close early.
- Click here to submit to SAND.
FICTION & FLASH FICTION GUIDELINES
We have reached our submissions cap, submissions for fiction are now closed.
TRANSLATION GUIDELINES
- We accept translations into English of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and flash.
- We often include the original version of the poem or flash piece alongside the English translation in the journal. For reasons of space, we publish longer translations in English only.
- The original work may be previously published, as long as it has not been previously published in English translation.
- Permission must be granted for publication from both the author and translator and, if necessary, the author’s publisher.
- Please include a name and brief biography for both the author and translator in your cover letter, as well as a copy of the text in its original language.
- Click here to submit to SAND.
VISUAL ART GUIDELINES
** Submissions extended until 7 May **
- We are interested in art that has a contemporary context and makes something visible about our world – from the smallest everyday details to wider social issues. We are interested in experiments with colors, shapes, tones and textures as well as layers of meanings and stories. We would like to see work that is surprising, challenging, searching, questioning, subversive, invigorating, quiet, hesitant, sensitive, haunting, enigmatic, joyful, playful, devastating, disorienting, unruly, unsettling, ungraspable and unexpected. For more on what our Art Editor is looking, see this article.
- We accept all forms of visual art, including photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, mixed media, sculpture, installation, performance and film/video stills, as well as trans/inter/multi-disciplinary work. We are interested in both full-color and grayscale images.
- Artwork may have previously appeared in an exhibition or online, as long as it has not been included in a magazine, catalogue, or other print publication.
- Please send 5-10 pieces for consideration, and include a link to your website if available.
- Please include an artist statement contextualizing the pieces you’ve submitted and/or your work as a whole.
- JPG, PNG, and TIF formats are acceptable.
- All images must be at least 300 dpi and in high resolution: at least 2480 pixels tall by 1748 wide so they can potentially be printed in a full page of our magazine. Prospective cover images should be at least 2500 x 3600 pixels. (See image below.)
- Click here to submit to SAND.
CREATIVE NONFICTION & FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION GUIDELINES
- Creative nonfiction is not open at this time.