Submissions

We welcome submissions of previously unpublished reviews, short essays, and poems, particularly poems with prose, narrative, or sequences in their sights, or poems with an environmental slant.

We're particularly keen to have short essays on poetic sequences and poets' novels. Please note that we don’t accept work that is simultaneously being submitted elsewhere. Before sending us material, please familiarise yourself with the journal to see if your work will jostle well with the other texts we’ve published.

How to send your work

We accept work only by email (not by post / snailmail). Please send submissions of work to Alex Houen using the following coded email address: <ah217  AT cam DOT ac DOT uk>. NB, the submitted text(s) should be sent together as a single Word document (see the formatting guidelines below) that includes a short biographical statement (150 words max) at the end of it. 

We like to receive submissions of two to five poems, or an extract from a longer work. Once you’ve sent work to us, please wait until we’ve replied with a decision before you submit anything again.

Selection process

We aim to report back on submissions within 10 weeks — please do not enquire about the status of your submitted work before at least 10 weeks has elapsed since submission. Given the large volume of contributions that we receive, we can’t offer comments on rejected work. And because we’ve difficulty in tying our budget’s shoestrings, we regrettably can’t offer payment for texts that we accept.

NB, if we do publish your work in an issue, please wait for a further two issues to be published before submitting more work for us to consider — that is simply to ensure breadth and scope of representation in Blackbox Manifold.

Formatting guidelines for submissions

• Don’t double-space text unless that’s how you want it to appear when published.

• Please note that like most journals, if we publish your submitted work we may reformat aspects like style of heading and font so that it’s in our house style. If we don’t do this, each issue looks messy. We always send proofs before we publish, though, so you can check that everything’s in order with your page before it’s publicly accessible.