The Spectacle's Mission Statement:

We welcome and embrace all styles, genres, and modes of writing, but we are particularly interested in vivid, striking imagery and language that lingers with us long after we’ve finished reading. We value relationships between the literary and visual arts, and aim for content that reminds us that our lenses matter—they focus, distort, clarify, and conceal.

Send us your slipstream and irrealism. Send us your eco-fabulism. Send us your villanelles about time travel and your reimagined fairy tales. Send us something new to believe in. Push and break boundaries. Stretch a genre to its extreme. Invent a new genre. Redefine Spectacle. 

In short, send us your most alive, your most dynamic, your most pressing art. We would be honored to spend time with it. 

Based out of the Creative Writing department at Washington University in St. Louis, The Spectacle is committed to publishing work from under-represented voices, including BIPOC, women, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, and people who have disabilities.

Submission Guidelines for Issues:

Please DO NOT submit to more than one category at a time. 

We don't accept previously published work.

Submissions are accepted via Submittable only. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept print manuscripts. 

We are happy to take simultaneous submissions, but if your work is accepted elsewhere, we ask that you withdraw or partially withdraw your submission immediately by adding a note to Submittable. 

Please do not email us to withdraw or partially withdraw work. 

Please do not submit more than once per reading period. 

Authors retain all rights to their work, but The Spectacle requests that you wait three months after publication to republish your work elsewhere (exceptions will be considered). If your work is republished, we ask that you note its initial publication in The Spectacle.

Former issue contributors should wait at least one year after publication before submitting work to subsequent issues of The Spectacle.

For all other queries, contact us at thespectaclemagazine@gmail.com. 

Please note that current students of Washington University in St. Louis, or alumni who have graduated as recently as three or fewer years ago, are not eligible for publication in The Spectacle.