MIEL’s open reading period is June 1-30 each year. Submission details are available June 1 on our Submittable page, or on our website under ‘submissions’.
A heads-up on things we’re especially interested in this year:
- We’d love a chapbook (up to 36 pages) of essays or flash essays, especially with a focus on natural history, science, the history of medicine, and/or the intersection of any of those with the personal.
- We’d also love a chapbook of essays/flash essays to do with local geography, language/dialect, migration, or similar.
- We’re interested in publishing more non-book book-objects (like Nancy Campbell’s How To Say I Love You in Greenlandic), and we’d love especially to see artists working in relief printing and watercolor/gouache. Yes to color.
- We’d love to see chapbook-length poetry manuscripts, and we love poems that don’t rely on a central subject (I!) to do their work. We’d especially like to see work from writers who incorporate languages other than English into their manuscripts, and work in translation (as long as permissions are clear).
It’s unlikely we’ll have the financial means to print full collections in 2015, but if you prefer to send your full collection, we’ll happily read it—and if we can’t afford to publish it but we love it, we’ll ask you about excerpting it for a chapbook.
It’s always very useful to us if, in your letter, you can show an understanding of our books and our production process; ordering a book or two is the easiest way to achieve this. It’s also useful to us if you lay out the ways in which you’ll be able to support sales of your book. Pre-orders fund most of our printing, and writers who can help generate interest/excitement around their book’s publication are a huge help. That said, it would never disqualify a manuscript if you couldn’t do this.