Dear readers and friends,

The fall is back and so are we! We’re currrently open to all submissions and are continuing to read work that has already come in. If you submitted work, please know we’re working our way through the pile and will be in touch soon. Thanks for your patience.

Every fall, we’re excited to nominate work for Best of the Net awards. For the first time this year, we nominated work in visual arts. Here are this year’s nominations for the 2024 Best of Net Anthology (for work published between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023). Congratulations to all these writers and photographers!

Essays

To the Woman Who Served Me Menudo Thirty Minutes Before the Restaurant Closed by Lucy Zhang

Praying by Ear by Erica Goss

Poetry

Escape Route by Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò

Still Life with Roses by Caitlin Cacciatore

Prayer for Our Failings by Alfred Fournier 

Space is Silent by Victoria Melekian

In the Stillness of After by Robert Okaji

A Moonlit Equation by Ana Reisens

Fiction

Undertow by Kelli Short Borges   

To My American Daughter-in-Law by Myna Chang  

Art

Photography by Maroula Blades

Photography by Sherry Morris

Photography by David Osu

~

In case you missed our 2023 Flash Fiction Contest news in September, we chose as winner, “Pinch Hitter,” by Michelle Ross. Our two top finalists were: “George Gershwin Invites Arnold Schonberg Over For Table Tennis”  by Laton Carter and “Love Says My Husband” by Jill Witty. We were so grateful to writer Sabrina Hicks for judging this year’s contest.

We are also grateful to our volunteer staff for helping us stay afloat — reading submissions, interviewing writers, reviewing books, and offering feedback to writers on their work. As always, we invite you to donate to our nonprofit literary journal and help us continue paying for the work we publish.

For upcoming closures, please check our website Submit page. We plan to close to poetry submissions on Nov. 1, and to all work for the year on Nov. 15. Stay tuned.

Thanks for being here.

Warmly,

Beth Burrell & Rudri Patel
Founders and Editors