Please read the genre-specific guidelines before submitting to Lunch Ticket.

GENERAL SUBMISSION  INFORMATION

• Lunch Ticket’s 25th Issue comes out in June 2024.
• The submission window for Lunch Ticket's issue #25 is February 1st to March 1st.
• The submission window for Translation and Young Adult genres has been extended to March 31st.
• The submission window for Amuse-Bouche is fromFebruary 1st to April 1st.
• Visual Art can be submitted year-round, but will only be reviewed from February 1st to March 31st for the spring issue and August 1st to September 30th for the fall issue.
• Submitting to Lunch Ticket is always free.
• Please submit to Lunch Ticket only once per submission reading period (regardless of genre).
• If your work has been published in Lunch Ticket, please skip one submission reading period before submitting again.
• All submissions at Lunch Ticket are read anonymously in the first round. We only read pieces that have all identifying information removed. Make sure no identifying information exists in the document title, submission title, or the work itself. Identifying information (such as names and bios) can only be included in the cover letter, and not in any attached files or the submission title.
• We allow simultaneous submissions. Please indicate in your cover letter that this is a simultaneous submission, and if your piece is accepted elsewhere, you must notify us immediately.
• We do not accept previously published work (this includes work published in personal blogs or social media).
• We welcome multilingual submissions in all genres.
• For all genres, contests, and Amuse-Bouche you will receive a selection notification. We will contact you no matter the result of your submission.
• We do not accept AI-generated work.
• Submitters must be 18 years of age or older.
• All submitters are added to our bi-monthly newsletter email subscriber list.

Lunch Ticket is an online literary and visual art journal, published in June and December. We are proud to host two prizes, the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. We publish content throughout the year in our Amuse-Bouche series, featuring an individual writer or artist every other week.

NOTES ABOUT OUR CONTESTS:

This submission reading period, anyone hoping to be considered for the Gabo Prize for Translation & Multilingual Texts should submit their work directly to our Literary Translation Reading Team. All Translation submissions will be automatically considered for the prize.

Anyone hoping to be considered for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction should submit their work directly to our Creative Nonfiction Reading Team. All Creative Nonfiction submissions will be automatically considered for the prize.

Notes About Publication

If your piece is selected, Lunch Ticket retains the first North American serial rights of the work to publish, produce, reproduce, distribute, and market. All other remaining rights revert to the author upon publication. If the work is published again, we ask for a credit line to indicate that the work first appeared in Lunch Ticket.

We encourage submissions from Antioch University Alumni, but we require that two or more years have passed since their graduation. (Please see our “About” page for further opportunities for students and recent graduates.) We do not accept submissions from the Antioch MFA program’s faculty or staff for publication in any section of the journal.

Literary Translation note: Please refer to standard Lunch Ticket guidelines for either poetry or prose. Your submission should include the original work along with your translation. We also require a statement that grants us permission to publish both the original work and the translation online, and that certifies that you have received permission from the original rights holder (either the publisher or the author, as applicable) to grant us such rights. Please read more information here.

Thank you for your interest in submitting to Lunch Ticket. We look forward reviewing your submission!