Florida Review at UCF

Submissions

No correspondence (including manuscripts) will be read or acknowledged unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. No electronic submissions, please.

It usually takes us 3-5 months to consider a submission and send a response. Our response time is slower during the summer. For queries, send a letter and self-addressed stamped envelope through postal mail, or e-mail us at flreview@mail.ucf.edu. Please read an issue of The Florida Review before you send us your work in order to get a feel for the kind of writing we publish.

To make it easier on our staff, who handle a large volume of manuscripts, we have the following suggested guidelines for our contributors.

General Guidelines

All submissions should be sent with a cover letter and a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE). Please consider using "Forever" stamps for your SASE. The cover letter should include the author’s name, address, phone number, and e-mail address (if applicable). The cover letter should also state the title of the submission or submissions, word count, and whether or not there are any simultaneous submissions. Please include a brief biography of the author or artist.

Please include no more than one submission (1 fiction manuscript, 1 nonfiction manuscript, or 3-5 poems). We will consider revised submissions, but please don't send an unchanged manuscript multiple times. Also, please don't send new submissions until you've received responses on previous submissions, and send no more than two per reading period. Our first reading period is August through December, and our second reading period is January through May.

International submissions are welcomed, but must be accompanied by an International Postal Coupon. No e-mail submission under any circumstance. We have received work from Cambodia sent via the post and published it. So, please follow our guidelines as an international writer. Any e-mail submission will be deleted with no response to the author.

The Florida Review accepts simultaneous submissions (work that is submitted simultaneously to two or more journals). We only ask that we be notified immediately, preferably by e-mail, should a submission to us be accepted elsewhere.

The first page of the manuscript should also include all of the author’s contact information, including their name, address, phone number, and e-mail address (if applicable). Manuscript pages should be numbered.

We don’t have any length limitations. A quality story can be any length. However, particularly long stories or novel excerpts sometimes would require us to sacrifice space that could go to multiple shorter, but equally good, works. A good story justifies its own length, whatever that may be.

Fiction and nonfiction manuscripts should be sent in a standard large envelope. We particularly appreciate 9 x 12 inch envelopes without a clasp, because this is easier for our mailing system to handle. The manuscripts should not need to be bent to fit. Poetry submissions may be sent in letter envelopes.

Please address the parcel to [Genre] Editor. For example, a fiction manuscript parcel should be addressed to "Fiction Editor" on the outside of the envelope. This is to avoid confusion in our mailing system, and allow us to more easily identify manuscripts from other mail.

Our genres consist of Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, and Media (which includes visual art and graphic narrative).

Prose

We enjoy fiction and creative nonfiction of high quality—stories that aren't afraid to take risks. We aren't especially interested in genre fiction, although good stories and essays transcend genre. We welcome experimental work. We also consider short short stories and novel excerpts provided they stand alone. Please submit only one short story or essay at a time. We will also read up to three short short stories, as long as the total page count remains under 15 pages.

Poetry

We look for clear, strong poems, filled with real people, emotions and objects. We welcome formal verse but prefer poems in which form is secondary to content. Please include page breaks between poems, and submit no more than five poems at one time.

Visual Art

Visual artists are encouraged to submit two-dimensional works in any medium for a color cover or black and white spread within the magazine. Submissions may be sent as paper photographs or on a CD-ROM or via web link, but we will not open any e-mail attachments. If sent in manuscript form, submissions may be addressed to "Media Editors."

Graphic Narratives

The Florida Review is now interested in graphic narratives. We look for graphic narratives that show both artistic and literary merit. Graphic narratives are printed in black and white. Submissions may be sent in manuscript form, addressed to "Media Editors."

Withdrawals and Queries

We prefer withdrawals and queries to be sent to us via e-mail. When sending a note about a withdrawal, please include the title of the withdrawn work, the genre, the author's name as it appeared on the submission, and the date (approximate is okay) that the submission was sent to The Florida Review.

Because we accept 5 poem submissions at a time, sometimes only one poem of many needs to be withdrawn. In these cases, please indicate if you would like us to consider the remaining submissions. Once one poem is withdrawn, the other poems remain in our reading queue. If we have interest in one of the remaining poems, we will contact you.

If you ask us to consider the remaining poems in a submission after one is withdrawn, and we do not respond, please wait the standard 3-4 months before sending us more poetry.

Address all submissions to:

The Editors [Indicate Genre]
The Florida Review Department of English
University of Central Florida
PO Box 161346
Orlando, FL 32816-1346