We are OPEN for submissions.
Please review our submission guidelines below before submitting your work.
Submission Guidelines
We currently accept submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork from writers who have experienced institutionalization/psychiatric hospitalization, inpatient rehab or eating disorder treatment, the troubled-teen industry, the foster care system, or other modes of institution. You do not have to provide "proof" of your experiences, yet we ask that if you do not fall into these categories that you please refrain from submitting.
For poetry, please limit your submission to up to 5 individual poems in one document. For fiction and nonfiction, we ask that you limit your work to 20 double-spaced pages and under. Our team is small, so shorter work is all we can manage, though we hope to have the capacity for longer works in the future.
We also accept visual art, such as drawings, paintings, digital arts, mixed-media, and photographs that give viewers access to institutionalized life or your emotions/experiences. If submitting artwork/photography, please submit up to 10 jpeg. files in a single submission. We may accept all or only portions of your submission, but if a work is part of a larger portfolio that you wish to have published together, please indicate that in the body of the email. You may also submit an artist’s statement explaining the significance of your work, which will be published with your piece if it is accepted, though you will have the opportunity to change/expand on your statement prior to publication.
Formatting
On the first page of your submission, please include your name, email address, and a short third-person biography (Ex: John Doe is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. He has previously been published in [publication name]/this is his first time being published.). This helps us keep our submissions organized! If we accept your work, we will reach out for a longer author bio for the mag (and will also allow you to use pseudonyms in the actual publication, if you wish).
Please use a 12-point font such as Times New Roman or Garamond. You are welcome to send doc., docx., or PDF files. Please title the document with your last name, genre, and the title of your piece (Ex: DOE_FICTION_SUBMISSIONTITLE). If you can't send a document/PDF file, you can also send your work in the body of your submission email.
We appreciate trigger warnings. We will not consider or publish anything obscenely violent or pornographic, or any work that is racist, queerphobic, xenophobic, or sexist in nature.
When you are ready, email your submission to
theinstitutionalizedreview@gmail.com or fill out our Google form.
We can't wait to read your work!
Ready to submit?
Additional info
There is no age limit or restrictions for submissions; we do not discriminate based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or age. We are specifically seeking work from those who have been through institutionalization/
hospitalization themselves, though are also willing to consider work from family members or close friends, so long as it does not paint the subject in a bad light. We do not consider work from mental health workers/staff.
We celebrate simultaneous submissions—submit your work to as many places as you want! Just let us know if it’s accepted elsewhere as soon as you can (we’ll celebrate for you, too!).
For our magazine, please only submit one piece per genre per submission period.
If your piece is accepted, it may undergo light grammar revisions (commas, periods, typos—the basics). If we would like to accept your work but feel that additional edits are needed regarding structure/content, we will reach out with our thoughts, and you can decide whether you would like to move forward with us. We will never exclude you from the conversation surrounding edits—we are here to champion and advocate for you.
If you are not accepted to our magazine, please know that it does not necessarily reflect the quality of your work. We are certain that we will receive many incredible submissions, but we can only publish a limited amount, so please keep writing and submit to us again in the future!
We aim to respond to submitters as quickly as possible, but there’s more of you than us. If you’ve submitted and haven’t heard back from us within 3 months, feel free to inquire about your work at under the subject “inquiry for (title of your piece)”.
All rights revert to author upon publication. We cannot currently offer payment to our contributors. We hope this is something we can do in the future.
