Even an excellent literary magazine doesn't necessarily last forever. There are quite a few journals the After Happy Hour editors used to read (or were published in) that now no longer exist--and that's a shame, because they published great stuff that people should still be able to read. 

We'd like to help fix that with a special online issue dedicated solely to work that was published in now-closed markets. What we specifically mean by that:

• For print publications: They are no longer publishing new content in any format and past issues are no longer available for purchase directly from the publisher (or will be unavailable by May 2025, for print journals that just announced their closure).
• For online publications: Either a) the website is inactive, or b) the journal has shown no signs of activity on their website and social media accounts for 3+ years

Any creative work that was published in a journal that meets one of those qualifications is eligible for this call. This includes stories, poems, personal essays, graphic narratives, and works of art, along with hybrids and mixes of the above. We're interested in works from any and all genres, and especially in ones that blend, blur, or fall between genres. 

We are only looking for reprints for this call. Unpublished work will be rejected unread. If you have unpublished pieces that fit our current contest theme (Food) you can submit them on that form. Otherwise, please wait for our next unthemed open call, which will open March 1st, 2025.

All work selected for this issue will be paid a flat rate of $10 per piece. The reading period will be open concurrent with this year's contest, from November 1st, 2024 through January 31st, 2025.

General submission guidelines

Poetry: no line or word limits. 

Fiction: We have no hard word count limits, though we are unlikely to publish something of novella length. 

Creative nonfiction: We are specifically looking for lyric or narrative nonfiction, not scholarly essays (though if you’re using the tropes of scholarly essays within the context of a personal essay, that we do want to see).

Suites: Send up to 5 linked works that will be considered as a set. Individual works within a suite can be poems or flash or micro-length prose (under 1,000 words each).

Hybrid/Cross-Genre: Yes, please. Follow whichever of the above guidelines makes the most sense for your work. 

For all submissions:

• Please include a brief (100 words max) 3rd-person bio with your submission.
• To limit editor bias, we read all submissions anonymously. Please remove your name and contact information from the document (including the headers, top of the first page, under the title, etc.) before submitting it.
• Use standard manuscript format (11- or 12-point font like Times New Roman, double-space prose/single-space poetry, etc.). We won’t reject you for weird spacing or a bad font (probably), but following this standard makes things easier to read, and that makes the editors happy. Poets/experimental prose writers have more liberty here if the non-standard formatting is used for formal or stylistic reasons. Straightforward prose writers have no excuse.
• We accept submissions only through Submittable. Submissions sent to our e-mail will be deleted unread.
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted, just please withdraw your submission if it's accepted somewhere that would prohibit After Happy Hour from publishing it (e.g. a market with a post-publication period of exclusivity). 
• Multiple submissions are accepted.
• If you need to withdraw a longer prose piece, or an entire packet of poems or flash prose, you can choose the “withdraw” option on Submittable. To withdraw a single poem or flash piece from a packet, you can message us through Submittable or e-mail us (afterhappyhour [at] gmail [dot] com).
• Accepted submissions may be edited for grammar. All changes will be sent to the author for approval before publication.
• We request one-time publication rights (we can publish your work once) and non-exclusive electronic archive rights (we can keep the issue with your work in it online in our back issue archives). The author always holds the copyright to their work and retains all other rights, including the right to publish the piece elsewhere after its publication in After Happy Hour.

We're putting together a feast of words for our 4th contest issue. For this call, we're looking for stories, essays, and poems that feature food. That could be as a central image, an aspect of the plot (cooking it, eating it, growing it, etc.), a defining trait of the characters (cooks, servers, baking show contestants, etc.), or a key detail of the setting (restaurant, farm, canning factory, etc.). However it's used, food should feel necessary for and integrated into the work--we're looking for more than just a passing mention of breakfast on the character's way out the door. 

Food isn't just limited to Earth/human fare, either. Anything that a being consumes for sustenance counts as "food" for the purposes of this theme: predators hunting prey, plant-based lifeforms that "eat" sunlight, synthetic protein pastes, or any other means of gaining nutrients a lifeform could use. Beverages can also count, though we're not interested in the typical "bunch of people in a bar" stories (unless you're doing something very new, cool, and different with it). 

All entries are considered for publication. Contributors who aren't picked for a prize will be paid at our standard rate ($2.50 per printed page, $15 minimum/$50 maximum).

Each entry is $10, which covers:

• 1 prose work of 1,000 words or longer 
• 1 suite of up to 5 linked pieces
• up to 3 individual poems sent in a single document
• up to 3 flash or micro prose pieces in a single document

Update 11/17: In the first 2 weeks of the contest reading period, we received 30 entries and the current prize pool is at $125. If submissions keep coming in at that pace, we'll end up with around 180 entries and a prize pool of $750.

Can I include images?
This is a soft no. We can’t accept color images, photos, or full-spread comics and graphic narratives since it’s a print issue (we want to give money to authors, not spend it on fancy printing). If your work includes black-and-white sketches or other small visual aspects we can consider those, but in general we’re focusing on the words in this issue.

Can I send previously published work?

Not for this contest. However, if you have something previously published in a now-defunct journal that you want to submit, you can head to our other open call for our online special Reprints Only Issue for free (you can also submit original work for the contest if you have a reprint under consideration for that online issue).

Prize Info:
The winners and honorable mentions for this contest will receive a percentage of the total entry fees paid (including purchases of After Happy Hour print issues):

• Up to 3 “ranked winners” will split 30%.
• Up to 3 honorable mentions will split 15%.
   

How this will look in practice will depend on the work we receive. Possible scenarios:

• Three 1st place winners, one each in fiction, poetry, and CNF, who each get 10%; three honorable mentions, one in each category, that get 5% 
• Two 1st place winners, one each in poetry and prose, who each get 15%; two honorable mentions, one in each category, that get 7.5% 
• Overall 1st (20%) and 2nd (10%) place, plus 1-3 overall honorable mentions
• A single Grand Prize winner who walks away with the whole 30%, plus 1-3 overall honorable mentions

The more submissions we get, the more winners and honorable mentions we're likely to award.


What happens with the rest of the entry fees?
Submittable takes $1.49 for each entry, so roughly 15%. The remaining 40% will go to printing the issue, with a portion to be donated to our current donation partner, the Persad Center.


Why are you making writers do math?
We're sorry. The managing editor's a Virgo. But we do have a real reason. Mostly, a percentage-based prize lets us bump up how much authors get if we get a ton of entries. The flexibility also feels more fair than setting categories ahead of time. If the best submissions are all stories or all poems, we can adjust the prizes to reward the works we feel are the most deserving. This makes it easier to give prizes to hybrid and cross-genre works, too, since it might be tricky to fit them into a genre category otherwise.


How much will I win, though?
The total entries and prizes for our first 3 contests were:

• Year 1: 57 entries; 2 $103 winners (poetry & prose); 2 $56 honorable mentions
• Year 2: 95 entries; 1 $320 winner, 1 $160 honorable mention 
• Year 3: 178 entries; 2 $290 winners (poetry & prose); 3 $100 honorable mentions

...this year's prizes will depend on how many entries we get, but that gives you a sense of what prize winners have taken home in the past. 

General Guidelines:

Poetry: no line or word limits. 

Fiction: We have no hard word count limits, and welcome stories in that hard-to-publish 5,000-10,000 word length that justify their real estate. That said, this is a print issue, so we won't be able to publish anything that's a true novella length.

Creative nonfiction: We are specifically looking for lyric or narrative nonfiction, not scholarly essays (though if you’re using the tropes of scholarly essays within the context of a personal essay, that we do want to see).

Suites: Send up to 5 linked works that will be considered as a set. Individual works within a suite can be poems or flash or micro-length prose (under 1,000 words each).

Hybrid/Cross-Genre: Yes, please. Follow whichever of the above guidelines makes the most sense for your work. 

Other general guidelines:

• Please include a brief (100 words max) 3rd-person bio with your submission.
• To limit editor bias, we read all submissions anonymously. Please remove your name and contact information from the document (including the headers, top of the first page, under the title, etc.) before submitting it.
• Use standard manuscript format (11- or 12-point font like Times New Roman, double-space prose/single-space poetry, etc.). We won’t reject you for weird spacing or a bad font (probably), but following this standard makes things easier to read, and that makes the editors happy. Poets/experimental prose writers have more liberty here if the non-standard formatting is used for formal or stylistic reasons. Straightforward prose writers have no excuse.
• We accept submissions only through Submittable. Submissions sent to our e-mail will be deleted unread.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each submission must be accompanied by its own $10 submission fee.
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted for the contest. However, your entry fee will not be returned if the piece is accepted elsewhere and you need to withdraw it.
• If you need to withdraw a longer prose piece, or an entire packet of poems or flash prose, you can choose the “withdraw” option on Submittable. To withdraw a single poem or flash piece from a packet, you can message us through Submittable or e-mail us (afterhappyhour [at] gmail [dot] com).
• Accepted submissions may be edited for grammar. All changes will be sent to the author for approval before publication.
• We acquire First North American Serial Rights for the print issue. The author always holds the copyright to their work and retains all other rights. There is no period of exclusivity and authors can anthologize or republish their work however they see fit, though we would appreciate a mention that the work was first published in After Happy Hour.