General submissions for the print journal will be accepted in 2025 from January 1 to April 1 and August 1 to November 1. Average turnaround time is six months, but we may take longer and ask that you do not query us until a year has passed.

Prose submissions: Manuscripts should be double-spaced, right margins not justified; 1,500–7,000 words. All nonfiction submissions will be automatically considered for publication in MQR Online. All stories accepted for publication will be passed on to a judge as finalists for the $2000 Lawrence Prize. There is no additional fee for the prize beyond submission.

Poetry submissions: Please submit up to 6 poems in one document, not to exceed a total of 12 pages. Poems published in MQR by early career writers (those who have not yet published a full-length collection) will be considered as finalists for our Page Davidson Clayton Prize.

Translations: Please submit translations in the appropriate genre and include biographical information for both the author and translator.

Upon publication, MQR takes a nonexclusive license to publish work in print and online in perpetuity, and requests that MQR is formally acknowledged as the first publisher in any reprints.

MQR is calling for submissions for a special issue on the theme of computer-generated text with particular emphasis on writing projects or pieces that feature machine learning methods and/or language models, large or small, such as those of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) family, GANs, RNNs, LSTMs, PyTorch, and more, in the generation, composition, or arrangement of text. The issue also welcomes pieces generated, composed, or arranged by computational non-machine learning methods such as Markov chain generation, Travesty methods; works generated with Python, Perl, p5js, RiTa, DIY languages, and so on. All pieces should be accompanied by a “Works Statement” of 500-1000 words that illustrates for the reader how the pieces were composed/operated/manipulated/prompted/coded etc. 

We are especially interested in works that do more than demonstrate the ability of certain software and programs to generate cogent text—so much is already evident by a casual interaction with ChatGPT. We are interested in works ranging from lyrical narratives to the experimental and innovative that aim to subvert, re-interpret, examine, challenge and recontextualize what it means to write with and within machine processes and that consider the literary and cultural effects of using computational systems as writing tools. We are interested in work that shifts our perceptions of generated text and that probes the limitations and failures of language models in unique and interesting ways. 

We welcome texts in all genres (poetry, prose, art, and researched essays). In addition to original, previously unpublished works in all genres, we also welcome collaborative work, translations, and visual works that can be presented in print or digitally on MQR online. 

Guest Editor: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

The issue will be published in October 2025.

Maximum length for articles, essays, and works of fiction is 7,000 words.

Poetry submissions must not exceed 10 pages. 

If Submittable is not accessible to you, please email mqr@umich.edu 

Edited by Michael O'Ryan

On our sensory experience of cinema, Agnes Varda speaks about the individual’s “mental movie theater,” and how, upon consuming a film, “a new image titillates or excites another already there…” accumulating in such a way that the associations our memories make with these images “ring a bell.”

For this issue of MQR Mixtape, I am seeking poems, short stories, visual art, and essays that grapple with film’s capacity for impact, revelation, and resonance on both individual and collective scales. I invite a broad interpretation of this subject, from work that interrogates or sheds new light on the theory, craft, and history of cinema, to work that engages ekphrastically with the medium, or anecdotally with the movie-going experience. I’m asking for your writings on film philosophy, meditations on filmic representation, and takes on the camera as illuminative or distortive archivist. Send me something reflective of whichever bell cinema has rung within you. 

For this particular issue, please submit:

Poetry: up to three poems

Prose (short stories, flash fiction, essays): up to 3,000 words

Visual art: up to five works

Short films: one piece, up to 10 minutes in length

Hybrid work: up to three pages

Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted by another publication. Please send only one submission per window; subsequent submissions will be rejected automatically.

Submission Deadline: January 20, 2025