Literary Journal Submissions
Pool Party is a reading series and online lit mag seeking fiction, poetry, and personal essays that evoke the nostalgia of 70s horror and gothic fiction—pool parties gone wrong; suburban drugs, sex, and murder; and the weird shit kids do when their parents aren’t looking. Pool Party is the place to come if you want to feel a lot nostalgic, a little bit bad, and a fair amount of heart-wrenching passion and regret.
Please read our submission guidelines below before sending your gripping work to editors@poolpartymag.com
Looking for our reading series submissions page? Click here.
Guidelines
Please send all original submissions to editors@poolpartymag.com with a subject line that follows this format: [type] submission [date]. In other words, Essay Submission 2.14.2025. Please confirm your submission has met the below requirements before sending.
- Submit only previously unpublished work (this includes publishing online via social media, substack, etc.).
- Send only one submission within a single reading period.
- Simultaneous submissions are totally fine, but please withdraw if you get accepted elsewhere. And if so, congrats!
- Submissions should be no more than 2500 words, and should be submitted as a Word Doc/Pages email attachment.
- Submissions should be double-spaced, and your header info. should include your name, address, email, phone number, word count, title, and should include page numbers.
- Before sending the email with your attached submission, please include a super brief and casual cover letter just so we know who you are. Be sure to include a short bio.
- Submitted drafts should be final but please be aware that our editors may request minor revisions.
- Do not submit anything generated by A.I. Although we know that writers and artists are doing interesting work that is in dialogue with A.I., we choose not to contribute to the ecologically disastrous impacts caused by utilizing this technology. We also feel strongly against publishing work containing crowdsourced language and phrases created by A.I. tools that have been ‘trained’ by subsuming existing authors’ and artists’ work without consent, credit, or compensation.
- Once your work has been accepted, Pool Party reserves first publication rights which return to the author upon publication. We kindly ask that, should you reprint your work in future publications, you mention that it found its original home with Pool Party.
- Submissions are and always will be free. Although no payment is provided for accepted works at this time, we hope to change that by the end of 2025.
We aim to respond to submissions within a month but response times can vary. Please do not follow up unless 90 days have passed since you submitted.
Questions? Email editors@poolpartymag.com
