IFP September

To be in a liminal state for long is a massive demand on one’s energy. And yet this is something that happens to marginalized people all too often. I think a lot of my poems are about this kind of discomfort. And also when a high-energy state is maintained for long, the release can be explosive.

Hello fellow voyagers!October is our favorite month on this Earth-planet we call home. We're stoked to say that we added a Discord channel to our Patreon. Discord is a place where the IFP staff (there are many of us now!) gets together to chat. Patrons get exclusive access. Won't you consider joining at just $1/month to help us make fantastic, inclusive books? In other news, there are about 60 novellas left for us to finish reading and respond to. We are now open to poetry books too! We are working hard on a post very soon regarding the submission data for our novellas call in order to evaluate our mission of publishing marginalized voices. And in October, we already have lined up an It Chapter Two review, an interview with T. King Fisher, a fantastic look at SFF libraries and archives, and more. Won't you send us your story ideas?Holly Lyn Walrath Managing Editor

Popular Stories This Month

Speculative poetry is a constantly-shifting market with a vast and diverse group of readers & writers. This month in our Q&A series, T.D. Walker (a talented poet in her own right and author of Small Waiting Objects from CW Books, 2019) touched base with one of spec poetry’s most powerful voices, Bogi Takács. Editor of the Transcendent series for Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, winner of the Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll for eir hypertext poem You Are Here / Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park.We also interviewed Valerie Valdes, author of Chilling Effect (Harper Voyager, September 17), first in a new series of fun space opera novels starring a Cuban-descended spaceship captain, Eva Innocente, and her misfit crew as they blunder their way through the galaxy trying to save her kidnapped sister from an intergalactic crime syndicate.

Call for Essays

We’re always open to submissions for essays on pop culture, film, TV, books, and games. We’re big fans of io9, Wired, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Book Riot, and Locus Mag. We want essays on popular culture, movies, books, video games, SFF culture, conventions, and anything else geeky. We’d love to see a focus on resistance, feminism, and edgy topics. We’re always interested in hearing from underrepresented and marginalized voices. How you define that is up to you.Read the full guidelines and submit your ideas!

Call for Poetry Books

Interstellar Flight Press will be open for chapbook and full-length speculative poetry books from September 15 – January 1, 2020. We are beyond thrilled that this call will feature a guest editor, Saba Syed Razvi, who will be reading submissions that are passed up to the editors from slush readers.​We are looking for: 

• Chapbooks 15-39 pages in length

• Full-Length poetry books 40+ pages (We are unlikely to take works over 120 pages.) 

• We only publish speculative genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Supernatural, Weird, Surrealism, or any combination of the above. We like Suzette Haden Elgin's definition of speculative poetry as "about a reality that is in some way different than the existing reality." 

• Hybrids or difficult to categorize collections are welcome. This includes prose poetry, visual poetry, erasure/blackouts, found poetry, cross- and multi-genre works. 

• Collaborative manuscripts are welcome, including visual/ekphrastic works. Both collaborators must be able and willing to sign a contract for publication.  (We will make an exception for public domain works, but please cite your sources.)   

Read the full guidelines for more info and send us your stories!