submissions
open
October 1-30, 2025

Blood Tree Literature publishes two online issues per year, in summer and winter, including contests for which we match prize awards in donations to relevant charitable organizations. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our newsletter and follow our instagram to be notified of calls for submissions, contests, and issue releases.

general GUIDELINES

Blood Tree is dedicated to showcasing evocative writing that takes linguistic risks to push the boundaries of conventional language and genre. We favor lyrical pieces that do not withhold depth or resonance. With that in mind, submit to us your best, the box under your bed marked UNSHARABLE, the orphan poem or black sheep fiction. Send us your experimentals; be vulnerable, be calculated. 

  • Maximum word count for prose: 2500. We like to keep it flash-y.

  • Maximum amount of poems per submission: 3.

  • Submission fee: $3 USD. Submission fees allow us to maintain our Submittable and website/domain, as well as pay our contributors and contest donations!

    • We now offer a free submission period during the first week of open calls, with a cap of 20 hybrid submissions and 30 collective poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction submissions.

    • If the free submission period has closed and our fee is a barrier to submitting your work, please email us at bloodtreelit@yahoo.com for a no-questions-asked link to our fee-waived submission form.

    • With a $15 USD submission fee, we will provide detailed feedback and constructive notes on your submission. This applies to all genres.

  • Abusive or derogatory submissions are not allowed — not now, not ever. BTL is a pro-choice, trans-inclusive, anti-racist publication. AI-generated works are strictly prohibited.

  • Per piece accepted, we pay $10 for poetry, $15 for fiction and nonfiction, and $20 for hybrid and experimental pieces; all are in USD and processed through PayPal only. Published pieces are also eligible to be nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

We do not read full-length manuscripts or translations at this time, and currently only read works written in English. We only read reprints if the piece(s) were previously published in a now-defunct publication — please indicate in your submission if that is the case and attribute the publication of first appearance.

Simultaneous submissions are allowed under the condition that you withdraw your work immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. Please do not submit more than once per genre until you’ve heard back on your pending submission. If you have not received a response on your submission within two months, please query us via email to bloodtreelit@yahoo.com.

Contributors release one-time electronic rights of their accepted piece(s) to Blood Tree Literature and the right to electronically archive the work as a part of the issue in which it first appeared. Contributors retain copyright for their accepted work and may publish that work elsewhere after six months has passed since the BTL publication date. Honorariums for accepted pieces are processed through PayPal only. View a sample acceptance agreement here.

Without in any way limiting a published creator’s and Blood Tree Literature’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. Creators reserve all rights to license uses of their work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

CONTRIBUTOR BOOKS

If applicable, in your submission you may also include information for your recently published book with a link to where it can be purchased. Should your piece(s) be accepted, we will include the provided book in our Contributor Books page. If you are a previous contributor to BTL, you can notify us of new book publications for inclusion via our email: bloodtreelit@yahoo.com.

If you’d like to submit a review of a Contributor Book, we now offer a $15 USD honorarium for accepted reviews. There is no fee to submit Contributor Book Reviews. For more details, please visit our Submittable below. All other guidelines still apply.

 
 

Submissions are processed through Submittable. If this is not an accessible tool for you, please email us at bloodtreelit@yahoo.com to discuss an alternative.