Nice Cage

Submission Guidelines

Open Call: none

Nice Cage is not open to submissions at this time.

Nice Cage publishes poetry and short fiction and believes writing should be willing to experiment and evolve. We hold these truths to be self-evident: substance is as important as style, thinking about things is important, and writing should have emotional impact (because feelings are important).

Before submitting, read our mission statement to get a feel for what we're looking for. We look forward to reading your work.

Nice Cage isn’t interested in:

creative nonfiction, essays, reviews, or interviews
young adult fiction
mysteries/crime fiction
westerns
haiku
observational poetry

Nice Cage looks for work that:

says something
approaches unconventional subjects
has a narrative or tells a story
explores genre without cliches
experiments with language and form
evolves and presents dilemmas without easy answers
embraces tension and conflict

Send Us Your Work

Simultaneous submissions are accepted and encouraged. Just notify us if some other lucky zine grabs your work before we do.

We're especially interested freshly written work, but we'll publish work that has appeared on personal blogs/social media/forums/your mom's holiday newsletter. As long as it's quality work, we want to read it. Send us your best.

We're particularly interested in seeing work from writers who are unpublished and/or don't have an MFA.

We accept email submissions only.

When you're ready to submit your work, send us an email which includes:

your name
contact information (including your phone number)
the theme you're submitting for
credits for all previously published work

Your work should be sent to us as an attachment (rtf, word, or pdf) that has your name somewhere in the file name. Include your contact information on the first page of your manuscript. Do not put your submissions in the body of the email.

For poetry: Send 1-5 poems as one file. Include the phrase "POETRY SUBMISSION" in your subject line.

For prose: Send one story (3000 words maximum). Include the phrase "PROSE SUBMISSION" in your subject line.

Send all submissions to: nicecage.editor@gmail.com.

We try respond to all submissions in a timely manner. Please give us at least 3 months to respond to your submission. If you haven't heard from us after three months, feel free to contact us.

Payment and Rights

You retain all rights to your work. We do ask that you refrain from posting or publishing the piece you send us elsewhere (zines, blogs, forums) for one month after publication. After that month, you can distribute your work as you wish. We will archive a copy of the issue your work appears in on our site. If you would like us to remove your piece, let us know and we will remove it promptly.