Please read these guidelines before submitting. The link to the online system appears at the end of these guidelines.

We accept submissions year-round in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. Please include a cover letter with your submission.

Please send 3-6 poems, one short story of any length, up to three flash fictions of 1,000 words or fewer each, or one piece of nonfiction. Please only submit to one genre at a time. Address all work to the appropriate editor (fiction, poetry, or nonfiction) and include your contact information on the work itself.

Artists and photographers interested in having their work appear on an upcoming cover of the Cimarron Review should query by email at cimarronreview@okstate.edu. If our editors are interested, we’ll reply and request to see more work.

We do not accept the following:

• Submissions by postal mail
• Previously published work (includes work published online).
• Emailed submissions of any kind.
• Work by students currently attending Oklahoma State University.
• Handwritten Manuscripts

We do not publish theme issues. We are interested in any strong writing of a literary variety, but are especially partial to fiction and poetry that engages the reader through a distinctive voice—be it lyric, narrative, etc. When submitting fiction, please do not include a summary of your story in the cover letter. Allow the work to stand on its own. For nonfiction, we are seeking literary essays of all kinds (memoir, lyric essay, personal essay, nature writing, literary journalism, etc), as long as they have emotional depth, crisp language, an engaging voice, and a strong, coherent structure. Essays should surprise us with their imagery and their insights about life. We have no set page lengths for any genre, but we seldom publish pieces longer than 25 pages. There are, however, exceptions to every rule. Our guiding aesthetic is the quality of the work itself.

For fiction and nonfiction, please number each page.

Poets should include all poems for submission in a single file.

If sending multiple flash fictions, please include all in a single file.

Submissions should be doc, docx, pdf, or rtf files and should include your contact information in the upper left or right-hand corner of each page.

Response time varies, but we typically respond to submissions within 3-6 months, often much sooner. At times, however, due to a backlog, and especially for work submitted in the summer, a response may take longer. If you have not heard from us after six months, please feel free to query by sending an email to cimarronreview@okstate.edu. Please do not query before six months.

Simultaneous submissions are welcomed, but please contact us immediately through email (with the date and genre of your original submission) should your work be accepted elsewhere. Please also withdraw electronically-submitted stories and essays accepted elsewhere through the online submission manager system. Unless poets or flash fiction writers wish to withdraw all poems and flash fictions from a submission, they should withdraw individual poems or flash fictions by email only.

For publication, Cimarron Review acquires First North American Serial Rights. After publication, rights revert to the author. At this time, the Cimarron Review pays its contributors two copies of the issue in which their work appears.

Please do not submit again to the Cimarron Review until you have heard from us. We reserve the right to send multiple submissions back to the author with no response. We do not accept alterations or revisions to manuscripts in any way after they have been submitted.

Submit electronically to Cimarron Review by clicking HERE.