Northern Michigan University

I Just Love Them! - Best Lit Mags of 2025

Annual literary journal sponsored by Northern Michigan University, has published short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid writing since 1979.

Passages North, the annual literary journal sponsored by Northern Michigan University, has published short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid writing since 1979.

 Email us at passages@nmu.edu or write to us at Passages North, NMU, 1401 Presque Isle Ave., Marquette, MI 49855.

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Passages North

Send us your well-written, innovative creative nonfiction up to 6,500 words

Ray Ventre Memorial Creative Nonfiction Prize

Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize

We always want to keep regular submissions free, but if you'd like to contribute a small donation to PN, this is the spot. Your contribution helps us showcase literature that matters. Rocket Fuel submissions will be processed at the same rate, and with the same consideration, as regular submissions. Please see below for a brief overview of our genre guidelines. We can't tell you how much we appreciate your generosity. Thank you!


Guidelines


Poetry:
Please submit a packet of 1-3 poems in a single document. If you need to withdraw part of your submission, leave us a note in Submittable.

 Creative Nonfiction/Hybrids:
Please submit 1 piece up to 6,500 words. 


Fiction:
 Please submit 1 story 1,000 - 5,000 words in length. 


Short-Shorts
Submit up to three short-shorts (fiction, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids) up to 1,000 words in a single document.

Rocket Fuel Submissions

The Passages North poetry editors are looking for work that is honest, conscious of craft and form, knows rules and breaks them, owns its transgressions, and challenges conventions. We want to feel punches to the gut and goosebumps of excitement. We are very much open to poems that are experimental or nontraditional and encourage submissions that get us discussing, questioning, and thinking.
Please submit a packet of 1-3 poems for consideration. If you need to withdraw part of your submission, leave us a note in Submittable.
Genre editor: Patricia Killelea

Poetry Submissions

We're looking for all manner of well-written, innovative creative nonfiction (up to 4500 words) including, but not limited to, lyric essays, personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism. We enjoy work that pays attention to form and language—whether traditionally or experimentally—and explores and challenges the boundaries of the genre. We seek work that is pathologically curious. That said, our primary concern is not with one particular component of creative nonfiction, but with the quality of the work. 
In addition to standard (whatever that means) submissions, Passages North wants your hybrid work. Send us your orphans, your bastards, your bumpings, and your grindings, whether whimsical, grave, or neither. 
Note: Submissions with extensive use of color are less likely to be publishable in our issues, though not impossible.
Genre editor: Matthew Gavin Frank

Nonfiction/Hybrids Submissions

Send us up to three short-shorts (fiction, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids) all pasted into one document. For us, a short-short is anything beneath 1000 words (though we’re not bean counters).
On brand for our short-shorts: snowy + magical, density + clarity, mystery, precision, unique worlds and voices,  honesty, restraint, suggestion, an image that makes us stop and re-read, meditations that make us feel lost but not alone, a final moment that breaks us. 
If you need to withdraw part of your submission, please leave us a note via Submittable.
Genre editor: Jennifer A. Howard

Short-Short Submissions

We are open for fiction submissions from Sept 1-October 15 and from Jan 1-Feb 15.
Please send us your best short story, 1000 - 5000 words in length. The Passages North team has diverse interests; so send us your weird, your experimental, your speculative, your genre-bending, your brave, risk-taking work. We are looking for unique, impactful, powerful voices. We’d love to read stories featuring settings we’ve never seen, situations we couldn’t have imagined, and characters that pull us in for the ride. That said, we love the quiet ones too—the ones we’ve seen before but still hit and burn softly in the back of our brains for weeks. We want your entertaining stories and your emotional stories. A good way to win us over is through great dialogue, a propulsive first page, and an ending that either leaves us completely satisfied or begging for more. Don’t be afraid to send us your stories that hit close to home—we promise to treat them with care. 
Genre editor: Esperanza Vargas Macias

Fiction Submissions

We're looking for visual art, for our cover and for
an eight-page color inset on high-gloss stock. We like images that draw us in and make us think: experimental, exacting, compelling,
confounding. Narrative and figurative elements nice but not necessary. Word and image combinations welcome. Send up to 12 digital slides, no more than 3000 pixels on their longest side.

Visual Art

Send us your best fiction up to 10,000 words. We're open in terms of content and form. The contest fee is $15.00 per story and submissions will close April 15, 2024.
Judge: María Alejandra Barrios
First prize: $1000 and publication in Passages North. One or more honorable mentions may also be selected and published.
All entrants receive a copy of the contest issue.
Submissions must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please let us know if the piece is accepted elsewhere (refunds are not available). Students of Northern Michigan University and close friends of the Passages North staff are not eligible.

Waasnode Short Fiction Prize

Send us your best short-shorts (1000 words maximum). We open to any genre: stories, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids, etc. Submit up to 3 short-shorts in a single document. The contest fee is $15.00 per entry and submissions will close April 15, 2024.
Judge: Stephen Fishbach
Stephen Fishbach is a Pushcart-winning writer, reader, parent, podcaster, and Survivor legend. Learn more about Stephen at his website: https://stephenfishbach.com/ and follow him on twitter or on instagram.
First prize: $1000 and publication in Passages North. One or more honorable mentions may also be selected and published.
All entrants receive a copy of the contest issue.
Submissions must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please let us know if the piece is accepted elsewhere (refunds are not available). Students of Northern Michigan University and close friends of the Passages North staff are not eligible.

Neutrino Short-Short Prize

We love experimental CNF forms so much that we made a whole new category! In Visual Essay, we are seeking work that plays on the page, bringing in color, texture, dimension; we're drawn to pieces in which the look is as meaningful as the content. We'd like to consider new meanings of the word "collage." Draw us in, consider the physicality of your work in our hands, turn us into Flat Stanley as we traverse the 2d space... and of course, above all, give us work that is curious and compelling.
Note: Submissions with extensive use of color are less likely to be publishable in our issues, though not impossible.

Passages North

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