Big Muddy is an annual print journal that publishes an 8 x 8 perfectbound, color-cover, print issue.
We are open for submissions year round. We accept fiction, poetry, and essays. Send us your original, previously unpublished manuscripts. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but we kindly ask that you notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere (if you've submitted multiple pieces, email upress@semo.edu to withdraw part of your submission). Please limit number of individual pieces submitted to: (1) for fiction, non-fiction, or review, (3) for flash fiction, flash non-fiction, (6) for poetry.
We are unable to pay contributors at this time, though if your work is selected for the print issue, you will receive two copies for free.
We used to say please allow up to six months for a response, and we do our best to keep to that, but sometimes we take longer (and sometimes we're quicker). So, please be patient with us.
Moving forward, poetry submissions will be open from May - August.
As some of you might have noticed, we suspended book reviews for the last two years due to COVID-related complications of getting review copies, and getting those copies out to our reviewers, etc...
Now that this is no longer a problem, we're excited to bring reviews back starting with issue 22 (to be published Fall 2022), and to open things up a little. In addition to accepting submissions of recent/current small press books, we'd also like to open up our submission queue to older small press books. Think of this as an opportunity to champion less recent small press books that you discovered years after they were published, or that stuck with you but which aren't talked about much any more.
As for length, we'd like to keep things in the 400-800 word range, but we're open to bigger ideas if you've got an idea you're excited about!