The Louisville Review publishes two issues each year.

There is no fee to submit fiction, poetry, or poetry by young writers in grades K-12 for our Cornerstone section.

The general call for Fiction and Poetry for TLR #100 is open September 21-26, 2026.

We will hold the next call for Cornerstone September 21 - October 31, 2026.

GUEST FICTION EDITOR Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, and the Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University Bloomington. She also teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, Homeward, and Untethered. House Repairs won the 2021 Alabama Library Association Poetry Award. When Stars Rain Down was a finalist for the 2021 Langum Prize, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Homeward was shortlisted in 2024.

GUEST POETRY EDITOR Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, earned a B.A. from Hollins College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has taught at Hollins University, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and at the University of Kentucky, where she was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Johnson is the author of Naming the Afternoon, published by Louisiana State University Press, which won the George Garrett Fellowship of Southern Writers New Writing Award, The Falling Horse, published by Factory Hollow Press, and most recently Subsidence. She served as editor of Mississippi Review, including a special issue on The Prose Poem, as well as an anthology, 30 years of Mississippi Review. She edited The Collected Poems of Jane Gentry. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Conduit, Tin House, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Johnson is Professor of Creative Writing and English and teaches in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University.

GUIDELINES:

SUBMIT ONCE, IN ONE GENRE, PER ISSUE

Unpublished work only. This includes online publications, such as Substack.

We do not accept work made with the assistance of any form of AI.

Special Categories for TLR 100:

Long-Form Fiction: Submissions of approximately 4,000 - 7,000 words. The Louisville Review  aims to be a home for long-form fiction! For our 100th issue we're reading a limited number of longer stories. Capped at 50 submissions.

Fiction: Submissions of Fiction / Flash Fiction / Hybrid Prose submissions of up to 3,500 words. Send us your standard, short, and flash fiction! This category is also open to experimental, lyrical, or hybrid short prose. While we do not read unsolicited creative nonfiction at this time, we welcome work that is fictive but does not fit neatly into the fiction genre. Please note we cannot print in color or print images. Capped at 100 submissions.

Poetry: Submit up to five poems. Please be sure all poems are in a single document before uploading. Each page should include complete contact information for the author. Translations are welcome if permission has been granted by the original author.

Cornerstone: Submissions of poems by students in grades K-12. The Louisville Review accepts submissions of previously unpublished poetry from students in grades K-12 for publication in our Cornerstone section. Cornerstone submissions must be accompanied by parental permission to publish if accepted. 

ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES

Returning Cornerstone Contributors: We enthusiastically welcome submissions from previous TLR Cornerstone contributors! However, if you have had work accepted in Cornerstone please wait two issues before submitting again.

Returning Contributors: We enthusiastically welcome submissions from previous TLR contributors! However, if you have had work accepted in the general call for either Poetry or Fiction in the last two years please wait four issues from publication before submitting again in that genre.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted:  Any work accepted elsewhere must be withdrawn immediately.

Withdrawals: Entire submissions can be withdrawn by logging into Submittable. For partial withdrawals (single poems, for example) message us via Submittable.

If your work is selected for publication: We provide one complimentary print copy of The Louisville Review to our U.S. based contributors with a discount on additional copies shipped to the contributor's address. International contributors receive a digital copy of t issue.

Have any questions you’d like to ask before submitting? Send us an email at editor@louisvillereview.org.