Most events are installed on their deadline date, unless there is a long submission window or unless it's a rolling submission.
P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, F=Fiction
For our final contest of 2025, we’re asking writers to dissect deception in all forms: quiet lies, shams, secrets kept, masks worn, counterfeit stories, and half-truths. We want them all.
For this contest, Four Tulips is looking for short prose and poetry with themes of warmth and comfort. Wining pieces will have rich imagery and be best served with some hot cocoa on a cold winter’s night
"Islands: Real, Imagined & Metaphoric" is meant to be a broad prompt — poems about independence, isolation, resilience, nature, and singularity, for example, all might fit!
As always, we are open to literal interpretations as well as unusual or unexpected interpretations of the theme.
We invite you to contribute pieces that embody the Palestinian experience—its struggles and its enduring capacity for hope, creation, and collective flourishing. Let this issue be both an act of remembrance and a celebration of life; a space to honour the voices and visions that persist, even under siege.
Show us what it means to arrive.
We want true tales from your life. Honesty that possesses both the situation AND the story. Intensely personal experiences that reflect universal truths about what it means to be human.
We seek to present poetry, essays, and short stories that are compelling and in someway represent an aspect of the super present.
Centering on homelessness and the unhoused, this issue explores the human stories behind stereotypes, societal failures, and the fight for basic rights like shelter and healthcare.
Send us your flesh, your shearing, your camouflage and your chase, your drive and your defeat and your hunger.
Send us your best poems, short stories, and essays about the fae as seen from a Pagan/polytheistic, witchy, and mythological point of view.
Stories can be based around any facet of the season, whether it’s the weather or Christmas (or any other seasonal holiday). As ever, there is one main rule. It must make us laugh!
What is home to you? Each of us encompasses a unique definition. Whether it’s the refuge of a childhood room, an emotional attachment to a physical item, or a memory; home is anything we cherish in our hearts.
We’re asking about the risks you’ve taken, the risks you’ve avoided, and the risks you can’t avoid.
Taken on its own, “gibbous” represents a concept still in the works, under construction, nearly-there. Perhaps this is what it means to live in a gibbous phase of the decade: something swollen, marked by tension and possibility.
For this issue, we'd like you to send us work that reflects on the idea of mending as a slow process of repair. To us, mending feels physical, intentional, and patient; what does mending feel like to you?
Some people aren’t human. Actually, mostly people aren’t: cats, sharks, trees, rocks, and everyone in between each hold histories and vital relationships that are too often sidelined in favor of anthropocentric narratives.
For this issue we invite work that traces the edges of intimacy and illusion. We seek longing projected across distance, the distortions of connection, and the gifts of being alongside – with or without perception and recognition.
We are looking for queer protagonists in any setting or genre where the narrative fits any of the above themes (defiance, survival, hope, love).
For this issue, we are open exclusively for our BIPOC Writers project.