NOTICE: We're currently beta testing a new submission manager. If you'd like to submit to our Fall 2020 General submission period, please follow this link:

We will begin accepting submissions on September 1st, 2020.

Published twice annually by the Michigan State University Press, Fourth Genre is a literary journal devoted to publishing notable, innovative work in creative nonfiction. We love essays in which the ideas accrete, accumulate, and augment, but definitely not those that appropriate. We don’t want essays about your penis. We don’t want essays about your cat. Well, some of us do. But we’re in a market of cat-saturation right now, so paw softly.

During our editorial discussions, these are some of the questions we find ourselves asking: Whose story is it to tell? Whose voice is this essay amplifying? Whose existence is it erasing? How does the writer situate their experiences and histories in relation to other experiences and histories? What’s this essay doing or addressing that we haven’t seen before?

We are thirsty for essays that give us something to drink besides mainstream ideologies and forms, that showcase imagination and meaning-making capacities, that embrace a love of a sentence’s shape. That center the margin or marginalize the center, or even better, that blow up the center-margin borders. We want essays that make the common uncommon—that’s not about the thing that it’s actually about. You know, the essay about your shoelace that’s not really about your shoelace. We want to read more of the nonfiction essays that reflect the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, class, identity, gender, sexuality, diasporas, borderlands … that are cultural, lyrical, experimental, personal, environmental, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as expository, analytical, exploratory, or whimsical. Although we can’t publish in color, we’re interested in essays with visual elements—graphic essays, blackout essays, and so on. We want to publish the best creative nonfiction essays, understanding that notions of “best,” of taste and genre, are political and cultural.

The two (2) issues come out usually, hopefully, in late August and early February. The February issue contains the contest winner and is featured at the annual AWP conference.

• General submissions are accepted September 1 - November 30 only. Reading fee is $4. Authors selected for publication are paid with two (2) complimentary copies of the journal.
• Where Submittable prompts you to create a cover letter, please include your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, and title of piece, and approximate word count. But DO NOT include your name or contact information anywhere on the manuscript you upload--not even in the file name.
• 8,000 word limit
• Multiple submissions not accepted from individual authors during the general submissions period.
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but require immediate notification to Fourth Genre if accepted elsewhere
• Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize submissions are accepted January 1 - March 15 only. For additional information about contest submissions, visit the Essay Prize Page.
• Reading fee for the Essay Prize: $20 (U.S.) for each individual submission (multiple submissions accepted).
• NOTE: For both reading periods, we read blind, so be sure your name or any other identifying information does not appear on the manuscript or in the file name.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT