FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Where/how can I submit my work?
A: Like many literature journals, the Breakwater Review uses Submittable to manage all submissions. You can find our submittable page at https://breakwaterreview.submittable.com. For more details on the format of your submission, please see our submission guidelines.
Q: Do you accept email submissions?
A: No, we will not read or consider email submissions.
Q: Is there any work that you won’t consider?
A: We do not consider work that contains excessive violence, ableist language, racist language or attitudes, or anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments. We also do not want to see excessive swearing/cursing or obscene/graphic language– we don’t mind the occasional swear, but swearing for the sake of it doesn’t impress us. If your work includes hate slurs and hate speech, it will be automatically declined. We are committed to the safety of our team, as well as our submitters and the literary community at large. To that end, we reserve the right to deny or remove the work of any submitter who is known to harass, abuse, or threaten others in the community. Of course, we are not always privy to this information, so if you see work in our issues that was written by someone known to do harm, please notify us. We will not reveal your identity to the submitter in question, and we will honor requests for removal. We believe survivors.
Q: Do you have a citizenship requirement for your contests?
A: Breakwater does not ask for nor consider the citizenship of contestants when judging for the Peseroff Prize and the Fiction Contest.
Q: Do you consider simultaneous submissions?
A: Yes, but we ask that you notify us immediately if your work has been accepted and published elsewhere. We do not consider work that has been published previously.
Q: My work was accepted elsewhere; can I swap it for another piece of writing instead?
A: No, we do not allow writers to swap out accepted work for new pieces. We ask that you create a new submission instead.
Q: Do you (still) have a free submission window?
A: While Breakwater offered a free submission window in the past, we only accept paid submissions at this time. We charge a reading fee of $3 for general submissions to help keep Breakwater fully operational and to be as accessible to our readers as possible.
Q: Do you publish issues in print?
A: No, we do not. We are an online-only literary journal that aims to be free and accessible to our readers. While publishing in print would be nice (and fancy!), we are a small and ever-rotating team of editors from the UMass Boston MFA program, we aim to bring to our readers high-caliber contemporary prose and poetry free of charge online.
Q: What rights do you request when publishing my work?
A: Breakwater retains first time publishing rights upon acceptance and publication of your work. Rights revert back to the author following publication.