And just like that, it’s a new season. This year, nothing about fall feels typical and we know many of you are juggling unpredictable school and work schedules. We’re grateful to readers for their time checking out Sunlight offerings. Recently The Writer magazine highlighted a bit about what we do here in its monthly literary Spotlight series. If you missed Melissa Hart’s story in the back-to-school issue, you can read it here.

Earlier this month we updated our Staff page to highlight our regular submission readers. We thank Susan Pohlman, Elizabeth Spencer, Kate Jones, and Amanda Steel for their insights and extra eyes. We also appreciate the work of Clive Collins, our poetry editor. We couldn’t do this work without them.

This year, we have received more submissions than in previous years and we’re working hard to review them, and to run work in a timely way. Please know that for fiction and poetry writers particularly, we hope next year we can meet our goal of running work within six months of accepting it. At times, this period grows to eight months or more, and we apologize. By running full weeks of poetry or short stories, and publishing more pieces on Fridays, for example, we’re publishing work faster. (We generally publish on Mondays and Wednesdays only; details on our About page.) We also will close to submissions of poetry and fiction on Monday, Nov. 2 until the end of the year, allowing us to catch up further on current work. We will close to all submissions during our holiday break from Dec. 21, 2020 to Jan. 4, 2021.

We are pleased to announce our Best of Net nominees for 2020 (all work must be published between July 1, 2019-June 30, 2020). Congratulations to our nominees:

Essay

Zucchini Bread by Erica Goss

A Personal Ad Unanswered for Twenty Years by Rachel Rear

Fiction

The Stupid Smart Girl by Monica Wang

A Shiny Little Blue World by Dan Crawley

Poetry

Installation by C.C. Russell

Planetary Differentiation Megan Freeman

The Geometry of Love by Diane Callahan

Cooking My Country by Othuke Isaac Umukoro

Eulogy for Arrival by Rae Rozman

The Jewelry I Wear Clara Rempe

 

As always, we welcome your support of our nonprofit literary journal. Donations go directly to pay artists for their published work (yay!). For more details, please visit our Support page. We are grateful for all support.

We wish everyone continued health and safety,

Beth Burrell & Rudri Patel
Editors and Founders, The Sunlight Press