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General Submissions:

Volume 12: our first issue of the year dedicated to showcasing the best of the best. Payment will be distributed based on profits from Patreon subscriptions and tip jar donations. Volume 12 will be the first issue where some sections are requesting theme-specific work. Keep reading to view special calls for Volume 12.  Reading period opens: Feb 1st - March 31st

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• Art Call for Volume 12: SPILLED MILK

  • "We seek art that embraces the mistakes, the "ugly," the blemishes. Art that celebrates how messy life is, exploring it in a way that points out its nontraditional beauty, to make us appreciate the accidents, the mishaps, the unplanned. Show us your "imperfection" and let us appreciate its imperfectness, to show us there is beauty in the dark and to reject the idea that art has to be perfect. Don't cry over spilled milk, send it to us instead. ​

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• Creative Nonfiction Call for Volume 12: ECLIPSE

  • “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.” - Audre Lorde, Sister, Outsider.

  • People who are biracial, nonbinary, multicultural constantly find themselves not being able to fit into the mold of what our society expects of them. Michelle Zauner in the essay/memoir Crying in H-Mart speculates on her mixed-race identity following her mother’s death. Audre Lorde in the essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” published in Sister, Outsider, talks about her inability to fit into the “mythical norm”—a knowing at the edge of our consciousness that says ‘that is not me’” when we look at what our society reveres as “normal” (i.e. straight, white, cis-het men). Rachel Charlene Lewis, a mixed-raced queer essayist-poet writes in the essay "Queering Gender, Queering Genre," published in Electric Lit, “There is, for me, validity to be found in space less easily labeled.” All of these great writers, thinkers, and creatives recognize that they do not fit on the binary scale of life and seek to break that scale. While society might reject our outsider status, within our work, all the many parts of ourselves are allowed to live freely and without judgment or definition. We want to read the parts of you that are not easily defined. We want all your facets, all your sides, all of your phases. No longer will we eclipse the parts of ourselves to better fit into a binary, we will become the sun, the stars, and the moon, all wrapped up into one.

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Volume 13: our second issue of the year dedicated to showcasing the best of the best. Payment will be distributed to contributors based on profits from Patreon subsciptions and tip jar donations. Reading period opens: TBA

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Mini Reading Series:

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TBA 

Important Notes:

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Starting with Volume 10, we will begin paying contributors through our profits from Patreon subscriptions as well as adding a tip jar option where readers can tip their favorite authors. Since this is our first time implementing this strategy, we don't have any hard numbers yet, but we hope you are as excited as we are!

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Please note that Defunkt Magazine requires First Serial Rights on all submissions/all mediums and that all published works may be considered for our annually printed anthology, Pushcart nominations, and Best of the Net.