Submission Guidelines

Anna van Schaap, Smoke Signals, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 48x36in

Anna van Schaap, Smoke Signals

Lunch Ticket is the online literary and art journal published by the MFA community of Antioch University (AU), a program devoted to the education of literary artists, community engagement, and the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental justice. The editors of Lunch Ticket share AU’s mission and values. With a commitment to publishing the best literary writing and visual art, we encourage submissions from underrepresented and marginalized artists and writers.

Our Projects

  • Main Issues are published in June and December, with reading periods from March 1 to March 31 and September 1 to September 30.
  • We cap submissions at 500 for both poetry and fiction. Once we hit that number the submission window for those two genres will close immediately.
  • We are proud to host two prizes in each of our main issues: the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction and The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. Both prizes are open for submissions in February and August.
  • Our Amuse-Bouche: Spotlight series is published every other Monday throughout the year, showcasing an individual writer or artist. We review literary submissions in all genres during January and July; the submission period for art is now open year-round and is selected from submissions to the Visual Art category.
    • Learn more about our curated occasional Amuse-Bouche series, including Writers Read, À La Carte, and Litdish on our “About” page.
  • School Lunch: a curated bi-weekly feature offering fiction, poetry, flash prose, personal essay, YA, and creative nonfiction, from writers ranging from ages 13-17.
  • Twitter Poetry Contest: a monthly feature of poems collected through our Twitter page @LunchTicket1

Our Genres

Lunch Ticket and our Amuse-Bouche: Spotlight both publish:

We welcome multilingual submissions in all genres.

Our submissions are always free.

For an understanding of our editorial process, please read our Editorial Statement on our “About” page. There, you’ll also find information about the other projects Lunch Ticket is engaged in.

Please read the genre-specific guidelines before submitting to Lunch Ticket. Submissions that do not adhere to our guidelines will be automatically rejected without being read. If the genre-specific guidelines are not visible when you head to Submittable by clicking the “Submit to Lunch Ticket” button below, we are not currently reviewing submissions.

If accepted for publication, Lunch Ticket retains the first North American serial rights of the work to publish, produce, reproduce, distribute, and market. All other remaining rights revert to the author upon publication. If the work is published again, we ask for a credit line to indicate that the work first appeared in Lunch Ticket.

We encourage submissions from AU’s MFA alumni for our main issues and for Amuse-Bouche: Spotlight; however, graduates must have completed the program at least two years prior to submitting for publication in Lunch Ticket. Please see our “About” page for further opportunities for students and recent graduates. We do not accept submissions from the AULA MFA program’s faculty or staff for publication in any section of the journal.

Literary Translation note: Please refer to standard Lunch Ticket guidelines for either poetry or prose. Your submission should include the original work along with your translation. We also require a statement that grants us permission to publish both the original work and the translation online, and that certifies that you have received permission from the original rights holder (either the publisher or the author, as applicable) to grant us such rights.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to view your work.

Submit to Lunch Ticket