PFN – About Place Journal Invites Submissions for Volume VIII, Issue IV, “On Freedom.” 

All around us, we see and hear calls for freedom from many different voices and different directions. Some of these calls are frightening; some are inspiring. How are we to understand this “freedom” moment? We seek poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid works that question, reimagine, and embody what freedom and unfreedom mean in our complex world.

We’re looking for work that explores freedom’s multidimensional nature—what historian Timothy Snyder distinguishes as negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is “freedom from” (oppression, constraint, violence), while positive freedom is “freedom to” (create, speak, love, flourish).

We’re also interested in work that engages freedom as a process. Freedom requires cultivating “habits of freedom” (Snyder)—daily practices that sustain and expand our capacity for liberty. Author Maggie Nelson also understands freedom not as a fixed state but as an ongoing practice.

We view the act of creation itself as a habit or practice of freedom—a claiming of voice and space. We invite submissions that not only speak about freedom but express it through formal innovation, boundary-crossing, and aesthetic risk-taking.

We welcome explorations of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “inwardness as a place of absolute freedom” as well as work that maps the external territories of political and social freedom. We’re interested in how art can articulate author bell hooks’ idea that “awareness is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom.”

We invite you to join us in the radical act of creative freedom, to challenge constraint and to imagine liberation in both bold and quiet ways.

All submissions should be previously unpublished and should engage with the theme of freedom in thoughtful and nuanced ways. We welcome work in various forms and styles, from traditional to experimental.

Work must be submitted via Submittable by August 1, 2025.

About Place Journal is committed to amplifying diverse voices and perspectives. We especially encourage submissions from writers and artists of historically marginalized communities whose experiences and insights on freedom may challenge dominant narratives and expand our collective understanding.

About Place Journal Submission Guidelines

Work can include:

• Poetry: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 50 lines each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx, odt & rtf. If your poetry submission contains special formatting, we suggest submitting a PDF in addition to your Word doc.
• Fiction, essays, creative nonfiction and other prose: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 4000 words each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx, odt & rtf.
• The total number of submitted pieces cannot exceed 5, even if your submission includes items from several genre categories.

Please provide a numbered list with the title of each work you are submitting (1 to 5 works) in the field of the Submittable form where indicated.

Each submission must be accompanied by a bio in doc, docx or rtf format. Bios must be in the third person and not exceed 150 words. If you want your website, Twitter, and/or Instagram links included with your bio, please include that information in the Submittable form.

By submitting, you guarantee you hold the rights to the work, and you grant About Place Journal the rights to publish the submitted work with first serial rights (FNASR). After publication, rights revert to the author. Original, previously unpublished work only. All pieces must be submitted through Submittable.