Submissions for our Spring 2026 Contest Issue will open on December 21, 2025, and will close on March 20, 2026.
Theme: The Empress
This contest is reserved for female-identifying and gender fluid writers only.

Taking our cue from Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot deck, we want your juicy channelings and reimaginings of the Empress in the form of flash fiction and poetry. Give us her lush abundance, her confidence, her feminine power. Make this your own.

We hope to choose a first place winner and a finalist for each category, flash fiction and poetry.
First place will receive $100, and the finalist will receive $50, payable via Paypal, and both will receive publication.

For more about my editorial aesthetic, read below, and read one of our free back issues.

For this call, we will accept flash fiction of up to 500 words, or poems up to 50 lines.
One fiction piece per submission, or up to 3 poems per submission.

For ethical reasons, the following entrants will be disqualified: friends of the editor, G.G. Silverman, as well as business associates (I define "business associates" as: if I have paid you to do a service, or if you have given me any promotional consideration for my writing, or paid me for a service), and students who have taken a long form course with me (longer than one day). If you have only taken a brief, one-day workshop with me, I don't consider you to be a long-term student and you may enter.

I no longer read entries blind. Please include your contact info on your document.

Multiple submissions are allowed.
Please, no simultaneous submissions.
A nonrefundable entry fee of $10 will apply.

We reserve the right to not choose a winner or finalist if we don't receive the quality we're looking for.

For future submissions calls, please check back here, follow our Facebook page, or subscribe to our newsletter.

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Please read carefully below for our editorial aesthetic, rights information, AI policy, and guidelines.

The aesthetic:
My editorial tastes mainly align with the original vision of The Green Sheaf: I love folklore, fairy tales, mythology, and the mystical. I also enjoy the speculative, the darkly fantastical, folk horror, the weird/numinous, the surreal/strange, the gothic, and magical realism/slipstream. Furthermore, I love poetic language, exquisite prose, and lush imagery. My favorite authors of short fiction include Angela Carter, K-Ming Chang, Carmen Maria Machado, Angela Buck, María Fernanda Ampuero, Agustina Bazterrica, Gwendolyn Kiste, Jamaica Kincaid, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Caroline Yoachim, Karen Russell, Ramona Ausubel, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Barbara Molinard, Leonora Carrington, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. I love the films of Robert Eggers, Federico Fellini, Tim Burton, and Guillermo del Toro. I’m also haunted by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Transport me with your words. 

AI Policy:
We will not accept AI-generated work.

Rights:
We request first North American serial rights—which will revert to you immediately on publication—and non-exclusive rights to archive your work electronically.

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