As an online writing community, we think of writing in broad terms that crosses genre-boundaries. This means we don’t limit our submissions to traditional writing and art – we accept all kinds of creativity, whether that be short films, music videos, photography, sculptures, and so much more! Whatever your creative passion is, we celebrate it here at NOVA.
To help you through this process, we have some guidelines below to help in the submission process.
Genres include: Anything at all. We have no limitations on genre. You can submit writing (art, song lyrics, poetry, short stories, scripts, essays, op-eds, etc.), art (photography, paintings, sketches, etc.), and any other multimodal form of art (videos, collages, audios of your songs, animations, etc.).
Word count: We do not have a specific limit on word count for written pieces, but please try to keep your piece to 5 pages. However, we also know that creativity has no bounds, so we will not penalize you if your piece is more than 5 pages. Reach out to w4clitmag@gmail.com if you have any questions or need any clarifications.
We also ask to please keep any video pieces to 10 minutes or less, though again, we will not penalize you if it is longer than this time limit.
Submission number: You may submit up to 5 pieces in each form.
A note on languages: We currently have editors who can review pieces in the following languages (English, Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish, Korean). We also encourage creators to submit their pieces with an English translation if possible, but we will leave it up to your discretion if you prefer the final version of your piece to be published only in its original language or with the English translation.
A note on content warnings: Please include content warnings on your piece as needed. We reserve the right to add more content warnings as needed. When you submit work, we ask that you are intentional with your inclusion of swear words, violence, sex, etc. Each piece will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Inclusivity language: NOVA strives to be a diverse and inclusive community and we want the works we publish to reflect that mission. Thus, works that promote racist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, xenophobic, unnecessarily violent or misogynistic ideas will not be considered.
AI Policy: Centering youth voices and perspectives is at the center of NOVA’s mission. AI tools generate artwork of all modalities by extracting information from other online content, sometimes by other artists who have not consented or been given credit. For this reason, NOVA does not accept pieces that are wholly or mostly generated by AI. If we suspect you have submitted something mainly AI-generated without informing us, we will not be reviewing your piece.
If you use AI in your submission in other forms (e.g. to check your grammar, give you feedback on your writing, brainstorm ideas, etc.), we ask that you accompany your piece with a short statement on how and why you used it. Please be honest about how you utilized AI. Our critiques will be informed by how intentionally and to what extent AI was used, drawing on the artist statement criteria below. Artist statements should include the following:
- What AI platform or tool did you decide to use (e.g., ChatGPT, DALL-E, perplexity) and why?
- How did you use it in your artistic process (e.g., name generating, world-building, revision of language/descriptions, etc.)?
- What prompts did you utilize in the creation of your piece? What outputs did your AI platform/tool provide?
- What do you think the tool adds to your piece?
- As an artist, how would you describe your perspective on using AI tools?
You can explore examples of artist statements in the Writing with AI portion of our latest issue. Learn more about the Writing with AI project at https://waiproject.org/.
We also recommend using these tools instead of generative AI to help with your creative process in the future. (NOVA is not sponsored by these; you can also do your own Internet search to find other non-AI tools.)
Copyright: Publications should be your original work. You are allowed to submit any pieces you have previously published to our magazine, and you are allowed to submit any of your published pieces from our lit mag to other organizations.
NOVA LITERARY MAGAZINE 