We are pleased to announce the theme for April and May 2019 submissions on this platform as “Coming Out”. Have you come out? Do you plan to come out in the future? Have you had a failed attempt at coming out? Do you have thoughts around the concept of coming out? We want to share diverse, impactful, and authentic stories on Coming Out as LGBTQ+.

We are open to receiving Fiction, Poetry, Creative Non-Fiction, Personal Essays, Fun Listicles, and any writing with a literary inclination. If your submission falls outside of the above listed but within the theme, feel free to submit it for a review.

Submissions are open to queer, queer-friendly and queer-ally people from the 25th of March – the 25th of April. However, submissions will close if we reach our publication cap (nine publications) for this theme.

In February and March, we explored the theme of “First Love” and published thirteen beautiful submissions. If you missed them, you can read all the First Love stories here.

All submissions must follow the guidelines below and should be emailed to info@crime.moviesandrave.com

1. The subject line of your email should state your name and title of the work. (If you want to be anonymous, your subject line should state ‘Anonymous’ instead of a name). Please ensure to include the title of your submission.
2. In the body of your email, indicate the genre your submission is (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, personal essay, opinion piece, illustration etc.), as well as your name, country of origin, social media handles (optional), and a short bio (optional). Personal details can be left out if the submission is anonymous.
3. Your submission must be attached to the email as a word document. Please do not paste submissions in the body of your email, send PDFs or powerpoint presentations.
4. We accept Fiction, Poetry, Creative Non-Fiction, Personal Essays, Illustrations, Fun Listicles, and any writing with a literary inclination. While we encourage LGBTQI+ themed submissions, other submissions are also welcome, but must be socially conscious, and resonate with the work that The Initiative for Equal Rights does.
5. Our suggested word count is not more than 2000 words for fiction/non-fiction, and not more than 1,500 words for opinion pieces, poems and others. Submissions should be read through and submitted with minimal typos and grammatical errors.
6. When we receive your submission, we will review it before responding to let you know if it has been accepted. Please refrain from sending reminders. We reserve the right to refuse submissions.
7. Be advised that we will edit your work and make some changes that could sometimes include the title.
8. Submissions which contain offensive slurs with malicious intents, overly sexually graphic or lewd content, hate speech, inaccurate information, sexist, misogynist, racist, tribalist or homophobic language will not be published. There is absolutely no way we will ever publish a piece with hate-talk in any form.
9. You retain copyright of your submission after it has been published on our platform.
10. Once we have reached our submissions cap for a theme, submissions will not be accepted until a new theme is announced.

Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or enquiries. We look forward to reading your stories. Cheers!