$50 Million Literary Arts Fund Launched; New Children’s Booker Prize; More Bait-and-Switch Publications; Subscriber Publications; Paying Submission Calls.
This monthly column is published on the fourth Thursday of every month, and is an opportunity for me to share information that doesn’t fit anywhere else in our publication. This includes a wide range of opportunities for writers, news and information, and subscriber’s recent success stories.
Opportunities:
Kinship Caregivers Connect is an online and statewide support group for kinship caregivers in Ohio, and they are putting together an anthology of caregiver stories. Kinship care describes when relatives or family friends, who are not a child’s birth parents, become the child’s primary caregiver, such as grandparents, aunts/uncles, siblings, family friends and others who are already connected with the child. For the anthology they are seeking “authentic, honest, and transparent stories of those with lived experience in kinship families, including kinship caregivers, those raised in kinship care, and other family members. The theme is “things that grow”. They are open to submissions of personal essays and stories till December 15th. You can learn more about the anthology here.
ELA Literary Magazine has a call for submissions from authors that are 18+ on the theme of Sultry Monstrous Untamed Tales (or S.M.U.T.) They are seeking work that is “A “new” way to look at old relationships.” and they expand on this by saying the following “We’re tired of reading the old tropes, and we’re tired of seeing the same tropes saturate the market. If we’re honest, we’re just a little tired of romance. We want to see what happens if the one night stand doesn’t go to plan, if the second chance romance goes just as badly the second time, if the fake relationship is a little too convincing. What happens when the forbidden love is actually something horrifying, if your crush never finds out you exist, if you actually decide to date a werewolf… and we’re sure there are more! We are looking for stories that fuel the fire, that bring passion back into the romance genre in new ways, that, true to our brand, subvert and surprise. So take those tired tropes, old and new, and reinvent them. Take the romance genre, take the concept of relationships, and turn it upside down. This is a collection of Stories Made Uncomfortably Tender!” Work can contain a little spice (which is to say it can be a little explicit). They close to submissions for this call on December 31st. Additional details on their submission guidelines page here.
Epistle Literary Magazine describes itself as “a love letter to educators everywhere. We publish writing that honors and appreciates the impact made on you by an educator or mentor in your life.” They are open to submissions for their second issue here. They are open to a wide variety of forms as long as your work answers the question: “How has an educator or mentor shaped you?”. They close to submissions on January 1st, 2026.
Cicada Song Press is putting together a poetry anthology called “Reality Detonates”. Each entry must include the exact phrase, “reality detonates,” within the body of the poem. It cannot be in the title of the poem. The submission deadline is November 30th. Additional details here.
Ludington Writers: Making Waves has a theme for their special issue: Pride 2026. They are asking poets, fiction, and nonfiction authors, and visual artists to submit works uplifting voices and experiences from the LGBTQ+ community and about it. Even though they use the word uplifting they clarify, ““Uplifting” in this context doesn’t necessarily mean we want only happy material. As long as it’s original work that avoids clichés and sentimental language, we want to see it!”. While they are not a paying market overall they will be giving out four $50 awards, to outstanding works chosen by the editorial team. Submissions close on December 31st.
Procrastinating Writers United (PWU) is open to multimedia submissions open for a 2026 print anthology. They are seeking prose, poetry, illustration, comics, and multimedia work for their anthology entitled I Haven’t Made It Home Yet. They say they are looking for pieces about the search for belong, particularly:
“returning to a familiar place and finding it changed or unrecognizable;
being displaced or out of place, feeling like a stranger;
memories and how they warp over time;
nostalgia, and missing something irretrievable.”
They close to submissions on January 11th, 2026. You can learn more here.
Blanket Gravity Magazine is a journal for fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. They look for writing and art that explores explore mental health or emotional life. For their second issue they welcome fiction and nonfiction the explore the optional theme of “Technology and Love.” There will be a special collection focused on that theme within the issue. They pay $40 per chosen piece. To see their complete submission guidelines, go here. They close to submissions on January 10th.
The 2026 Jason Reynolds / Simon & Schuster Travel Grant offered through The American Library Association is now open to applications from Black/African American youth or teen services librarians or school librarians/media specialists who work in either public or school libraries. Recipients will receive up to $3,000 (and not less than $1,500) to pay for expenses related to attending the ALA Annual Conference including but not limited to travel, housing, registration, and a ticket to the Coretta Scott King Award Breakfast. Five winners will be selected. The deadline for applications is December 15, 2025. Learn more here.
News:
The Booker Prize Foundation announced that it is launching the Children’s Booker Prize. The £50,000 Prize will be given out for the first time in 2027 to be best in children’s fiction for readers aged 8-12 written in or translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Learn more here.
The Literary Arts Fund was launched. According to their website: “The Literary Arts Fund is an unprecedented effort to dramatically increase support for and the visibility of the nonprofit literary arts field for the next five years, concluding in 2031, toward ensuring a healthy and more robust U.S. literary culture in support of creative writers.” They are backed by a coalition of seven charitable foundations: the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation. They have pledged to distribute a minimum of $50 million over the next five years, with continued fundraising planned.
After last month’s Notes from the Editor’s Desk coverage of journals attempting to bait and switch writers (which you can read about here), an author reached out to share that Adventures BookZine, a paying market, had accepted their story. The email they shared from the editor really encouraged the author to not wait a year to be published in their paying issue but to be published without payment in a special issue, that will come out sooner. The special issue was print, and would include their bio, but notably there was no mention of a contributor copy. This is very much a situation of bait and switch, again although with different specifics.
Also Bloodletter Magazine started sending out an email after an author submits, heavily encouraging writers to pay 65 dollars for feedback. It’s fine to offer a paid feedback option, in my opinion, but it is up to the submitting author to opt into doing so when they first submit, and should not be brought up again. This is also a lot to pay for feedback in the context of submitting.
Subscriber Success Stories:
Jamie Gill‘s short story The Hate Baby was published by Does it Have Pockets. They also had their short story Black Sky, Blue Earth published in Oyster River Pages and their short story Amelia in La Piccioletta Barca.
Laurinda Lind’s poem Our Measure was published at Write City Ezine from Chicago Writers Association.
Richard L. Carrico’s book El Presidio de San Diego: Excavating Southern California’s Lost City was published by The History Press.
Mark Scheel‘s poem The Invincibility of the Moment published in The Soliloquist Journal this month–the Fall 2025 issue.
Judith Teich’s poem Kubush was published in the Wilderness House Literary Review.
Sandy Benson‘s short story Mannequins in the Hobbit Barn, was named one of the winners of Academy of the Heart and Mind‘s 13 Days Halloween Contest.
W. Adam Mendelmaum’s book MALICE IN SLUMBERLAND was published by GrimTales and distributed by Miskatonic Books.
Rachel McCarron‘s short story The Craft of Half-Remembering, was published by Mslexia.
Itto & Mekiya Outini‘s story Righteous Hombres was published by Expat Press and their short story Three Paths, was published in Eunoia Review.
Dorian Burden’s story Ballet Whore was published by Sneaker Wave Magazine.
Bernadette Geyer‘s book of poetry What Haunts Me was published by April Gloaming Publishing.
Damon Nomad’s short story Bone Stew was recently published in the anthology titled An Anthology of Campfire Stories by Hellbound Books.
Jaslynn Middleton’s story Quicksilver was published by Tiger Leaping Review.
Odi Welter’s poem Popping Bubbles was published in the anthology America’s Slide Towards Authoritarianism by IHRAM Press, and their poem Menstrual Cup was published in the anthology Between Queer Teeth by t’ART Press. Their poem Apple Crisp was published in The Shallot by The Layered Onion on October 23rd.
Alice Wisler’s story To Whom Shall We Go was published in Living the Word published by Guideposts.
Kevin A Brown‘s piece Arrangements in Gray and Black: Portraits of Henry James was published in New English Review.
Charles Sartorius’s story Thirty-First was published by Metastellar.
Chen Du & Xisheng Chen’s translation of Yan An’s poems Knife for Decisively Cutting Off Floating Clouds and Sometimes Someone Is Only a Shadow were published by AGNI. Chen Du & Xisheng Chen’s translation of Wang Qi’s poem What Is The Firmament Hiding was published by the Meetinghouse Magazine.
Violet D. Nethermoon’s short story How Liam’s Dead Ex Ruined Christmas will appear in Holiday Spirit: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology from Dragon Soul Press.
Rudy Vener‘s short story Quad Cops, was published in Starship Sofa Audio Magazine.
Lance Mazmanian’s Essay Michael Jackson: A True Story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Poetries in English.
Masimba Musodza’s story Here Be Cannibals was re-published by Metastellar.
Cithara Patra had two stories published in Chewers.
F.I. Goldhaber’s poem Get Out was published by The Five-Two, and their rictameter Counting Spoons was published by Magnets and Ladders: Active Voices of Writers with Disabilities.
Mike Sluchinski had two poems published In Parentheses Magazine and three poems and art published by the Inlandia Journal
Anna Dodson’s flash stories Instructions for Lighting a Candle and The Last Round were published in Switch: A Magazine of Microfiction.
Hannan Khan had an interview and a poem Halwa for Hymen published in Kinsman Quarterly. They also won the October Monthly Contest at Collaborature for their poem Oodal Between Leaf & Light co-authored with Drakhshanda Saeed.
R. S. Mot’s drabble Autohaunting was published by 100-Foot Crow.
Mary Gilliland has 2 new poetry collections: Red Tide at Sandy Bend from The Bodily Press and Within the Shop of the Divine from Arc Publications.
Please send us an email at success.stories@authorspublish.com if you have a publication success you want to share in our next update. You must include a link to the publication. You can also include a link to your website (if you have one), and the publisher/journals main landing page. To be featured in the December update your work must be published no earlier than October. Work available for pre-order can be shared. Please note that we are only listing work that has been traditionally published by literary journals, magazines, or traditional presses. . We are not covering vanity presses or self-published books. We can only list three successes per person per update.
Bio: Caitlin Jans has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-founder of Authors Publish and The Poetry Marathon. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Literary Review of Canada, The Fiddlehead, Jelly Bucket, The Penn Review, The Adroit Journal, and Killer Verse. Her prose and poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, BILiNE, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and The Best of the Net. You can learn more at her website or follow her on Facebook,
