•  
  •  
 

Call for Submissions

Now accepting submissions for Volume 4, Issue 1 (Spring 2026)

Dear Amplify Community,

How are you holding up? Here at Amplify, the editorial collective is feeling all the feelings: anger, despair, fatigue, dread, distraction…and, when we’re least expecting it, connection, surprise, joy, gratitude, and a glimmer of the possible in encountering the writers and artists of all sorts who are defying the logic of the current moment with their refusal to stop creating, and with the things they are making through that living, breathing refusal.

It’s in that spirit that we share this call for the next round of submissions to Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism. While, as usual, we welcome submissions of all sorts, all the time, for Volume 4.1 we’re especially interested in submissions that work within formal structures of some sort, work that achieves escape velocity from those forms in the ways you writer- and artist-activists employ them. Work that paradoxically liberates itself (and us) even as it accepts the constraints of its form. Work that reminds us that our creative engagement with the facts of our existence is something they can’t take away from us.

Some of the forms you choose might be inherently political or often put to political use: think manifesto or erasure or protest song. Some might be more socially or culturally inclined, like the text of a greeting card, the obituary, the eulogy. Some of the forms might be bureaucratic: the to-do list, the cover letter, the narrative for promotion and tenure. The email to the legislator. The homily. The resignation letter.

Submit your work to Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism by December 1, 2025, for spring 2026 publication.

You choose the form, you craft the message, we (all) read the results – and we feel renewed determination to keep on keeping on, thanks to you.

Your accomplices,
Vicki Reitenauer & Rhiannon Cates

Before you submit, please review the journal’s editorial policies, including the peer review process that will follow your submission. Please email the journal’s editors with any questions you may have as you prepare your submission, or if you are feeling unsure about the length, format, or other aspects of your work as a potential fit for Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism.

We welcome your submission of work from the following broad formatting categories:
  • Articles, essays, fiction, creative nonfiction (up to 5000 words)
  • Poetry (up to 10 pages, submitted as individual poems or as a connected manuscript)
  • Written works that contain visual elements (including graphic texts and works that include illustrations)
  • Written works that include sound files