Submission Guidelines

Palmetto Row is open according to course rotation in Columbia College’s Creative Writing minor program. Each issue typically focuses on one of three genres: poetry, fiction, or literary nonfiction.

Our current call for fiction will close April 1st at 11:59 EST or when 120 submissions have been received.

Once you have reviewed the guidelines below, please use this form to submit! We look forward to reading your work!

General guidelines

We seek original, unpublished works from writers all over. We do not consider works created or modified with any generative AI, nor can we, as a Methodist-affiliated institution, consider works that promote perspectives that dehumanize or aim to shock merely for shock’s sake. We’re open-minded, but please be cool. We also cannot accept work from any current Columbia College (SC) students or faculty. We encourage those students to submit to The Criterion, our undergraduate journal! In general, works should be in English and written for an English-reading audience, but we’re open to multilingual language play.

We accept simultaneous submissions so long as you promptly withdraw if your work finds another home. Please submit only once per issue. If your work gets picked up elsewhere, please notify us by email at palmettorowliterary@gmail.com

Please include a professional 50-ish word biography in third-person with your submission. These may be subject to editing for space or content.

Format submissions in Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) in a readable font like Times New Roman, 12 point. Double-space prose. Number pages and use reasonable margins, etc. Place your name, email address, and word count in an upper corner of the first page.

We acquire exclusive first-time Internet rights only. All other rights revert to the author at publication. Works are also archived online. Submissions are free. We cannot currently guarantee pay for all published authors, but we offer a $50 editor’s prize for one selected work per issue. We ask that whenever an author reprints the work that first appeared in our pages, Palmetto Row be acknowledged.

We intend to reply within a month of the end of the final month of the current US academic semester. For this issue, that means by the end of May.

Specific guidelines for each genre are as follows:

Fiction

Submit one story between 300-4,000 words, give or take a few. (We will not discard a 4,025-word story if it needs the extra 25, nor will we turn our noses up at a riveting 299-worder.)

Our sole criterion is quality. Our tastes are eclectic, but a few writers the current editors enjoy include Edward P. Jones, Larissa Lai, and Kurt Vonnegut.

While we are very open to speculative elements, straight-up genre work is likelier to find a home elsewhere.

We only want novel excerpts if they can stand 100% alone.