WELCOME TO ELJ EDITIONS, LTD.
Emerge Literary Journal is OPEN to submissions. We are open to submissions in the following windows:
1/1-2/28
7/1-8/30
Manuscript submissions are currently CLOSED.
A kind reminder to submit all your pieces in one document and submit only once per submission window.
Submissions are open for Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and The Meaning of Kinship—an anthology about searching for, learning about, or encountering unknown close family.
We’re seeking essays about reckoning with the life-altering revelation of long-held family secrets or startling discoveries about your origins—for example learning you have no genetic connection to the person you believed to be your father; you have siblings you never knew about; you have a child about whom you had no knowledge; you discovered in adulthood that you were adopted or donor conceived; or you find your ethnicity or religion is not what you believed it to be.
Tell us about wrestling with whether to search for your biological relatives and about the outcome if you chose to search.
Write about acceptance and rejection and forging new relationships. Write about the consequences of secrets and shame. Write about how your experience upended everything you thought you knew about yourself, your identity, and your definition of family.
B.K. Jackson, founder of Severancemag.com, will edit the anthology, and Libby Copeland, author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, will provide a foreword.
Send us your original 2,000-word essays by November 16, 2025.
Contributors in the U.S. will receive a $25 honorarium, a contributor copy, and discounts on additional copies. Contributors outside the U.S. will receive the honorarium and a digital copy.
Emerge Literary Journal believes that #mentalillnessawareness and #endingthestigma are of paramount importance. We believe in the necessity of sharing our mental illness stories to facilitate writing through illness and create broader awareness. We aim to publish and showcase work in this category in each issue. We ask that you follow our regular guidelines (full guidelines here) for poetry and prose when submitting to this category.
Please send no more than 3 stories in one document at a time. We accept flash CNF up to a maximum of 750 words. You can see our full guidelines here.
Please include a short 3-4 line third person bio in the Submittable cover letter only. Please do not include biographical information or your name in the submission itself.
Please send no more than 3 stories in one document at a time. We accept flash fiction up to a maximum of 750 words. You can see our full guidelines here.
Please include a short 3-4 line third person bio in the Submittable cover letter only. Please do not include biographical information or your name in the submission itself.
Please send 3-4 at a time. You can see our full guidelines here.
Please include a short 3-4 line third person bio in the Submittable cover letter only. Please do not include biographical information or your name in the submission itself.