Brink has two reading periods per year: January and July.
January 1 - 31 we will open for hybrid and cross-genre submissions of any length and style engaging the theme of Chaos.
Through Submittable, we accept a variety of hybrid work from work that resists categories, Nonfiction to Fiction, from Poetry to Translation.
We are interested in writing that presses boundaries by using more than one medium to tell a story; work that looks and feels different on the page. Additionally, we look for submissions that engage the issue's theme and the notion of being on the brink.
Initially, you might approach chaos at face value. After all, everything feels like it is on fire. Long held beliefs, institutions, and environments are increasingly destabilized through the intervention of human hands. Accelerated capitalism is actively destroying the world as we know it, one ecosystem, community, or country at a time. That particular flavor of chaos is self-evident. We're interested in something with a bit more bite.
Consider how chaotic energy also gestures towards creativity. Something limitless and unmeasurable, boundless and ongoing. A bristling potential always on the verge of combusting on the spot. Chaos is a swirling intensity, but it often already exists before it is identifiable or named.
Tell us about the chaos of silence or stillness. The entanglements, to paraphrase Karen Barad, of matter and meaning. How would you write about chasms of nothingness? Or rework the myths of the primeval deities from which Chaos came? Plant life, paradoxes, or hybrid literary forms all gesture towards the possibility of chaos. So buckle in. Take us to that brink.
Please submit only unpublished pieces and notify us if your simultaneous submission is accepted elsewhere.
Open submissions to Brink Literary Journal are free.
Payment for each contributor is one copy of the issue in which their work appears as well as:
$25 || Poem (per poem)
$50 || Work (less than 1500 words)
$50 || Art (1-3 Images)
$100 || Art (4+ Images)
$100 || Work (more than 1501 words)
Are you stuck with your poetry manuscript? Needing support and advice?
Brink's Editor-in-Chief Hannah Bonner will be reading and offering detailed feedback on chapbooks and full-length poetry collections during the month of November! $750 for full-length poetry collections (up to 120 pages) will include written feedback as well as an individualized hour-long Zoom; $375 for chapbooks (up to 40 pages) will include written feedback as well as an individualized 30-minute Zoom with Hannah.
Hannah is the author of Another Woman (EastOver Press, 2024). A 2023-2024 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in BOMB, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Sewanee Review, among others.
The Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing is a literary contest that recognizes and awards hybrid and cross-genre writing that is exceptional in nature. Initial screening for the prize is facilitated by Brink Editors. The winner, selected by the contest judge, is announced in early May.
CONTEST RULES
The contest is open to all writers and artists who identify their work as hybrid or cross-genre in nature.
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Submit up to 15 pages of unpublished work
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One previously unpublished submission per entrant
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All entries will be read anonymously. Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your submission
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Family, colleagues, intimate friends, and contributors previously published in Brink Literary Journal are ineligible
CONTEST PRIZE
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$1,000
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Publication in the fall issue of Brink Literary Journal
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4 copies of the journal issue in which the winning submission appears
APPLICATION DATES AND FEES
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Submissions open January 1, 2026 - February 28, 2026
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$25 non-refundable entry fee
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A limited number of fee waivers are available upon request. Email info@brinkliterary.com for more information.
Diana Khoi Nguyen
Award for Hybrid Writing Judge 2026 || she/her
Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and her video work has been exhibited at Miller ICA. A Kundiman and MacDowell fellow, and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Randolph College and the University of Pittsburgh.
Carrie Green
Award for Hybrid Writing Winner 2025 || she/her
Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems and visual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Still: The Journal, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, Bellingham Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Carrie works as a librarian in a public library, where she hosts the Prompt to Page writing podcast.
Kristen Radtke
Award for Hybrid Writing Judge 2025 || she/her
Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the creative director of The Verge. The recipient of grants from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, her work has been nominated for a PEN/Jean Stein Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Metal, and numerous National Magazine Awards.
(photo credit: Amelia Holowaty Krales)
Michelle Phương Hồ
Award for Hybrid Writing Winner 2024 || she/her
Michelle Phương Hồ (she/her) is a poet based in New Haven, CT. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Apogee, Black Warrior Review, Poetry, Volume, and elsewhere, and has been recognized with the 2020 Frontier Poetry Industry Prize. Born to Vietnamese refugees, she received her MFA in poetry at New York University. She currently curates the comtemplative literary salon, quietly wild.
Renee Gladman
Award for Hybrid Writing Judge 2024 || she/her
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as a collection of essay-fictions, Calamities. A new work of auto-theory, My Lesbian Novel, is forthcoming in 2024. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others, and was a 2021 recipient of the Windham-Campbell prize in fiction.
Sasha Hom
Award for Hybrid Writing Winner 2023 || she/her
Sasha Hom is a writer, adoptee-activist, farm worker and mother of four, with interests in soil regeneration utilizing Korean Natural Farming methods. In addition to homeschooling her small children, she herds small ruminants. She was a Holden Minority Scholar at Warren Wilson College where she earned her MFA. She has taught writing workshops to BIPoC tweens adopted by white families and presented scholarly work for the Global Overseas Adoptee Links 10th anniversary conference in Seoul (while wearing a child on her Back). She has been published in the Journal for Korean Adoption Studies, as well as One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Polyamory... edited by Rebeccah Walker (Riverhead, 2010), Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings edited by Elaine Kim, and Laura Hyun Kang (AAWW, 2003), Kweli Journal, The Millions, and Literary Mama with work forthcoming elsewhere.
Lars Horn
Award for Hybrid Writing Judge 2023 || they/them
Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental non-fiction. Their first book, VOICE OF THE FISH, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and was an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, Horn’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Initially specialising in Phenomenology and Visual Arts scholarship, they hold MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. They split their time between Miami, Colorado, and the UK with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz.
The Emerging Writer Fellowship in Hybrid Writing offers editorial support, guidance, and mentorship to previously unpublished writers who demonstrate exceptional promise in hybrid and cross-genre writing. The fellow will work alongside the Brink editorial team to prepare their piece for publication. The virtual fellowship takes place over a period of four months in the fall and provides the following:
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One-on-one developmental editing with an emphasis on developing the innovative hybrid aspects of the selected piece
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Advice and guidance on career development via the submission and publication process
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Publication in a print issue of Brink
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Four copies of the journal issue in which the winning submission appears
GUIDELINES
The fellowship is open to all writers and artists who identify their work as hybrid or cross-genre in nature or who are interested in the process of learning how to hybridize their work in a readable, creative manner.
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Emerging writers who have not yet published a book-length collection are eligible.
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Writers with forthcoming books may enter if their first book is published after April 2025.
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Writers who have edited and published an anthology or a collection of other writers' works remain eligible.
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Submit up to 15 pages in one previously unpublished submission per entrant.
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All entries will be read anonymously. Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your submission.
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Family, colleagues, intimate friends, and contributors previously published in Brink Literary Journal are ineligible.
APPLICATION SUBMISSION DATES & FEE
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June 17 - July 31, 2025
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$22 one-time submission fee
Grace Morse
Fellowship Winner 2025 || she/they
Grace Morse is a nonfiction writer from New Orleans. Their writing can be found in Craft Literary Magazine, where it was shortlisted for the 2023 Flash Prose Prize, Aunt Chloe Literary Magazine, Cellar Door Literary Magazine, and others. She was also a finalist for Brink Literary Journal's Award for Hybrid Writing in 2025. Grace’s writing and teaching have most recently been recognized by awards and fellowships through the University of Iowa, where they earned an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program. When she is not writing, she is dancing, reading tarot, breathing deeply, getting pissed off, rioting quietly, loving loudly.
AP Paulson
Fellowship Winner 2024 || they/them
AP Paulson is a farmhand, writer & painter currently residing in Minneapolis Minnesota. Paulson's current work is centered on communicating & representing their experiences while moving frequently as a farmhand, navigating communal living in transitory spaces, and experiencing rural living as a queer, nonbinary, and neurodivergent person. Currently, Paulson is working on their debut chapbook “Muck.”
Simone Zapata
Fellowship Winner 2023 || she/her
Simone Zapata is a queer poet and educator from San José, CA. Her recent work appears, or is forthcoming from Beloit Poetry Journal, Foglifter, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Community of Writers and the REEF residency, and holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Oakland, and is a poetry editor for MAYDAY Magazine.