Editorial Policy

Our journal accepts submissions from all subsects of the Creative Nonfiction genre. This includes, but is not limited to memoirs, opinion pieces, open letters, personal essays, and biographies. Anyone from the University of Denver community including undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, family members, and staff can submit to this journal, with the stipulation that submissions cannot have been previously published. We still allows students to submit work that was previously completed in DU courses, so long as all authors of the documents are clearly cited. We hope that authors feel comfortable submitting to our journal whether they are a previously published author or someone who has never written creative nonfiction before. Along with our goal of showcasing the diverse student body here at DU, we want to help unpublished writers get more comfortable with the editorial process and expand their portfolios. 

The use of AI is permitted as an aid, with the restriction that AI use must be fully disclosed to Journal editors, and cannot have been involved in the generation of main bodies of text or images. Specific examples of acceptable AI use might be using Grammarly to pre-edit your piece before submission, having ChatGPT create a bibliography for you, finding sources using an artificial guide, or using image generation to spark your own image creating process. We do consider the submission of pieces that have been constructed with AI a form of plagiarism, and we urge against it– if you feel that your piece requires an artificial element, or are unsure how our guidelines fit with what you have created, please reach out to us. 

We are excited to represent the DU community, but unfortunately we cannot accept pieces largely written in languages other than English as our editors will not be able to assist or verify their validity. If you have questions about personal language choice, be it slang, region-specific vernacular, profanity, or the use of languages other than English, please reach out to us so that we can assist!

We are conscious of the fact that many pieces, especially when pertaining to poetry, are purposefully not grammatically correct. When it comes to prose, we will address these changes and give suggestions on how to improve; however, when it comes to poetry, we will apply a hands-off approach, meaning that we will simply note where audience members may get confused. If your choice is intentional or for whatever reason you do not want to take our editorial suggestions, you are welcome to compose a rebuttal. If the reason is accepted, then the piece will remain as the author intended. If consensus cannot be reached, then we hold the right to reject the piece in question.