We consider personal narratives on any subject and in any form, all year round, by young writers up to U.S. 8th grade (or its international equivalent). We have no minimum length; our maximum length is 10,000 words. If you have a longer piece, please consider submitting to our book contest, which we run annually during the summer.

Note that we are looking for personal narratives--I.e. vividly told stories about the big and small moments in your life--not, at the moment, for informational or academic essays. If you have an essay of that type, please consider submitting it as a blog post instead. 

NEW GUIDELINE FOR REPEAT SUBMITTERS: 

After having work accepted to the magazine, please wait at least six months before submitting again in any genre. This will help us ensure greater diversity of contributors in each issue. Thank you! 

How to Submit

• Upload only ONE submission; wait until you receive a response to your submission before uploading any more.
• Type cover letter text into the cover letter field with any additional information you'd like to send.
• Your submission should be single-spaced in Arial font, size 12. The header at the top of your piece should look like this:

Title

by First Name Last Name, Age

City, State (or Country if you are not from the US)

Example:

The Submission

by Emma Wood, 32

Santa Cruz, CA

• Use the Add File button to find the file on your computer that you would like to submit. Select the file and click on the Open button. Your file will then appear in the "file" field.
• Review your information to confirm that it is correct. Click Submit and you're done!
• You should receive a confirmation email letting you know that we've received your submission.
• If you are having any technical issues with your submission, please write directly to the Submittable team: support@submittable.com

 Important Notes

• Our current response time is about three months. We wish we could respond with personal feedback, but the volume of submissions received and the small size of our staff make this impossible.
• To make sure that you receive our e-mail responses, set your spam filter to accept messages from editor@stonesoup.com. Otherwise, notifications may end up in your "junk" or "spam" folder, or be deleted by your e-mail system. You can also check the status of your submission at any time by logging into your Submittable account.
• We can only consider submissions written in the English language. We welcome translations of work into English.
• We consider only previously unpublished work. Work that has appeared online for any reason is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted. However, we can be flexible. If you are unsure whether your piece counts as published or not, please write to editor@stonesoup.com.
   

 To increase your chances of publication, please read the detailed guidelines on our website:
http://www.stonesoup.com/stone-soup-contributor-guideline/