The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country’s premier literary journals. Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall has appeared alongside that of emerging artists such as JM Holmes, Lydia Conklin, Jessica Hollander, Emily Nemens, Charles Yu, and Ashley Wurzbacher, who was recently named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.
Poetry
The editors are interested in poems of nearly any length or aesthetic bent. Poetry submissions should be formatted either single- or double-spaced, and, if printed and mailed, on one side of the page only. As for how many poems to send, use your best judgment, but here are some suggestions: send no more than five short poems, two longer ones, or one really long one in any one submission. If your poem is a book-length epic, then think about excerpting.
Fiction
Fiction is generally in the form of short stories, but we welcome flash, novellas, and novel excerpts. While we don’t have a hard and fast word count restriction, 10,000 words is generally advisable as a maximum. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, and, if printed and mailed, on one side of the page only. Novel excerpts should be complete and self-contained; they should not require any written contextualization. Please, do not send us your novel and ask that we select an excerpt that suits our tastes.
Aesthetically, we are open to most styles and approaches. We do not publish genre fiction—mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy—but are certainly not opposed to considering work that self-consciously employs the tropes of such writing to language- and character-driven ends.
Essays
To complement the poetry and fiction, we publish nonfiction and creative nonfiction on a wide variety of subjects. All we ask is that the subject be treated in a literary fashion—gracefully and in depth.
As with fiction, 10,000 words is generally advisable as a maximum length. However long, manuscripts should be double-spaced, and, if printed and mailed, on one side of the page only.
Essay-Reviews
Essay-reviews generally cover three to five books and run about fifteen to twenty manuscript pages, which should be double-spaced, and, if printed and mailed, on one side of the page only. We do not publish short reviews of recently published books; we are interested in more extensive assessments of new publications, reviews that offer insights both broader and deeper than whether a given book is good, bad, or mediocre.
Visual Art
Each issue of the Gettysburg Review features an eight-page, full-color graphics section devoted to the work of a contemporary visual artist. Typically, we publish work by painters, but we have published a collection of color photographs, as well as drawings and reproductions of collages. Visual artists interested in submitting should send a selection of at least nine and up to twenty images with a cover letter offering an introduction to themselves and their work. Galleries interested in seeing work by one of their artists in the Gettysburg Review should send samples or exhibition catalogs along with an artist’s statement.
