Submissions
Submissions are currently closed. Check back in February!
To submit your work to Iris, please see our Submittable portal at the bottom of the page.
General:
Submissions will be accepted through the Iris Submittable portal.
We accept multiple submissions per person.
Each individual piece should be in its own document/file and submitted in a different form on Submittable (even if each piece you’re submitting is in the same genre).
We welcome submissions from those who have been previously published in Iris.
We consider previously published work.
We require your full name, phone number, and JMU email with each submission.
Iris has an anonymized evaluation process. For this reason, we allow submissions from Iris staff members as long as they are submitted outside of their genre group (for instance, a member of the prose team could submit poetry or visual art, but not prose).
Iris does not retain publication rights, nor offer financial compensation to artists and authors.
Iris celebrates the creative expression of JMU students—not the programming of AI. We don’t allow the use of AI in any of our submissions because it sabotages the development of an artist’s unique voice, necessarily formed by their own experiences and observations. An AI cannot have unique experiences and observations; it’s a machine that fabricates phrases and images based on whatever is part of its database. It’s formulaic. It breeds cliché. It defeats the purpose of making and sharing art, which is to connect more deeply with ourselves and other human beings. Therefore, we ask submitters to trust that their own perspective is far more valuable than the predictions of a machine.
Prose:
Each author may submit up to three prose pieces.
We require work to be double spaced and in Times New Roman 12 point font unless manipulation of fonts and/or spacing is important to the piece.
We do not have a strict word count limit for prose; however, works over 4,000 words must be extraordinary.
We will accept PDF files only.
Poetry:
Each author may submit up to five poems, totaling no more than 10 pages.
Please submit each poem in separate documents unless you are submitting a sequence (in which case we will evaluate them as one submission).
We will accept PDF files only.
Visual Art:
Each artist may submit up to 5 visual art pieces (including photographs).
We require that you indicate the medium of your piece (ex: oil painting, digital print, photograph, etc).
We require scans of art and photography; we will not accept photographs of physical pieces (such as drawings or paintings on paper).
We accept PDF and JPEG files only.
Submission Guidelines:
