Print and Web Issue Submissions open November 1st
We’re opening submissions, celebrating our contributors, and inviting you to join our community of care and creativity.
Dear Readers,
I’m thrilled to share that Hayden’s Ferry Review will be opening general submissions for our print Issue 78 and themed submissions for our web issue “Aftercare” on November 1st!
The submission fee for our print issue is $3. Web submissions are free!
Additionally, 100 free submissions per genre are available for underrepresented writers for our print issue.
Each new call feels like an open door—a chance to discover voices that surprise us, move us, and remind us why we love doing this work.
Our upcoming web issue, Aftercare, turns its gaze to what follows intensity, crisis, or rupture, the fragile moments when care, attention, and repair are needed most. Borrowing its name from the language of kink, this folio asks what it means to stay, to tend, to rebuild, and how slowness, reciprocity, and rest can act as radical forms of survival.
We invite poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, and hybrid work that explores gentleness and repair—emotional, ecological, or communal—and the radical possibilities of slowness, reciprocity, and rest as acts of survival.
If you’re interested in sharing your vision with us, we invite you to review our submission guidelines and send us your work. We’re so looking forward to reading your stories and hearing your voices!
Warmly,
Brennie Shoup, Managing Editor
Meet Our Team
In addition to the Genre Editors you met in our last newsletter, we’ll be introducing more of this semester’s masthead team in the coming weeks. Stay tuned to discover what they love, what they value, and the stories they’re excited to share @hfrlitmag!
Our 2025 Best of the Net Nominees!
We’re thrilled to celebrate the Hayden’s Ferry Review contributors nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology, honoring outstanding work published online across genres.
Poetry
From Desire
“The Fall I Lived Like a Spell” — Brooke Sahni
“Goin’ Dutch” — Michael Montlack
“Three Visions in Memphis” — Víctor Cabrera, translated by James Richie
From Futurism as Resistance
“Dig in: notes on Ukrainian soil” — Daniel Seifert
“Iolan Elegy” — Nathan Manley
“Aesthetic Statement” — Lydia Abedeen
Fiction
“The Evolutionary Biology of the Human Hand” — Sumitra Singam
“Reputations” — Lauren Barbato
Nonfiction
“Ten Types of Female Orgasms” — Callie S. Blackstone
Art
“Court Order” — Shaunté Glover
“Rebirth” — Eri Sawatzky
“Behind Bars” — Vianca Gray
We’re so proud to see this extraordinary work recognized—thank you to each of our contributors for sharing your vision, craft, and courage with HFR.
Coming Workshops
What if clothing could speak—and myth could transform us? ✨
Join two virtual generative workshops that weave story through fabric and origin alike. In Words & Waistcoats: Fashion as Storytelling, explore how texture, color, and sound reveal identity and character. Then, in Reimagining Origin Stories, guided by Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s ideas, uncover how cultural narratives shape who we are and who we might become.
Words & Waistcoats: Fashion as Storytelling, Virtual Generative Workshop
Clothing tells stories about who we are. This virtual generative workshop explores how fashion—through texture, color, and sound—can express character and deepen storytelling. Join us to write through the senses and reimagine fashion as narrative art with Ashley Cameron & Gladys Anette Sanchez Padilla.
A Return to the Source: Sylvia Wynter & the Power of Writing New Origin
Inspired by the work of Jamaican literary critic and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, this generative workshop invites writers to reimagine the stories that define us. Wynter’s lifelong inquiry into how cultural practices shape new ways of knowing and being reminds us that the task of changing the world begins with (re)defining who we are and where we come from.
Stay tuned for details @hfrlitmag about our workshops, events & join us soon! These writers will discuss their creative processes and the power of writing toward transformation!
New On Our Blog
This month, the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog features two compelling pieces that explore what it means to create, connect, and find meaning through art. From an in-depth conversation with Dennis James Sweeney on storytelling and persistence to Emad Jabini’s luminous review of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Penguin Randomhouse), these works remind us that writing is not only a craft—but a way of seeing the world anew!
As we open our next submission cycle and celebrate the work of our contributors, we’re reminded of what sustains us: community, curiosity, and care. Thank you for being part of the HFR family—we can’t wait to see what you create next.