Welcome to the University of Alabama Creative Writing Program submissions page.
Find active calls for submission below. For more about UA's Department of English and our undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs see our website. Contact Paul Albano (ppalbano@ua.edu), Assistant Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing, with questions.
Please submit all manuscripts as Word Documents through our Submittable page. You will be prompted to create a free user account that will allow you to submit your manuscript and monitor its status.
Please submit manuscripts as a single file and include a title page (without a name). We ask that your name be removed from the manuscript for blind reading (and only submit once per reading period).
For Children’s Lit:
- YA novels should be 20,000-60,000 words
- For middle-grade chapter books (ages 8-12), please do not exceed 50,000 words
- Illustrated chapter books must indicate whether an illustrator is needed from Red Rook, or if the author will work alongside the design team as the illustrator. Please submit illustrations as a single PDF or inserted into the Word Document
- For manuscripts that are part of a series, please submit the first installment only and include a cover letter containing information about the rest. Red Rook cannot publish the entire series in a single publishing cycle, but this information will help guide the first installment to align with the author’s vision
- To be eligible for publication, you must be enrolled as an undergraduate or graduate student (at any institution) during the semester of submission.
- Prose manuscripts should be 20,000-60,000 words.
- Submissions are open March 1st – November 1st, 2025
Guidelines for Submission:
1. Please submit all manuscripts as Word Documents through our Submittable page. You will be prompted to create a free user account that will allow you to submit your manuscript and monitor its status.
2. Please submit manuscripts as a single file and include a title page (without a name). We ask that your name be removed from the manuscript for blind reading.
3. To be eligible for publication, you must be enrolled in as a graduate or undergraduate student (at any institution) during the 2025 spring semester.
4. Prose manuscripts should be 20,000-60,000 words.
5. Poetry manuscripts should be between 50-125 pages.
6. Submissions will close March 15th 2025.
*University of Alabama employees are ineligible for publication
Red Rook Press is a growing publishing press dedicated to celebrating the work of undergraduate writers. As we expand, we're continuing to explore new mediums to promote fresh and exciting works, and we're happy to announce that we're now accepting digital content for publication on our website! Whether there's a piece of media you can't stop talking about, a viewpoint you feel like sharing, or a written piece you're ready to show the world, we're burning the midnight oil to see what you've been working on!
Our digital content consists of three sections, each of which you can submit to through the google form linked here:
Reviews: If you're like us, sometimes there's a story you just can't stop thinking about! Whether it's about a book, movie, tv show, video game, or piece of music, we want to your thoughts. Reviews should be between 350 and 1000 words.
Rhetoric: Our rhetoric section contains more formal essays on a wide range of topics, including literary analyses. Essays should be no more than 3000 words.
Writes: This section includes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry pieces. As with our publication submissions, we happily accept pieces from a wide variety of genres and styles. For prose, we request submissions be between 250 and 2500 words, and for poetry no more than 2 pages.
Simultaneous Submissions: Perfectly fine - just make sure you let us know if your work is selected elsewhere.
Payment: Our digital submissions are unpaid.