How to submit to The Dodge

The Dodge takes submissions through our Submittable for our quarterly issues (Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall).

Please take the time to read our submission guidelines below before submitting work. We're very pleased to announce that we now have fee-free submissions!

Submissions for a special teaching issue on Palestine and the Global Indigenous Struggle, "Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land," are open June 1–July 31, 2025. See details below. 

General submissions in nonfiction, fiction, poetry, translation, and visual art will re-open September 1, 2025.

We only accept hard copy submissions from incarcerated writers and those with accessibility needs: The Dodge, Dept. of English, The College of Wooster, 716 Beall Ave, Wooster, OH 44691

General Guidelines

The Dodge seeks your best work in eco-writing, writing about animals, and translation on these themes. Surprise us! We might see these categories differently if an especially good piece of writing strikes us as relevant. We’re excited by a wide range of forms and approaches, including hybrid and experimental work. Among other things, we’re interested in broadening the scope of stories, poems, and essays about nature and animals; we hope to see translations across borders, time, and space.

We receive a lot of work focused on dogs, cats, and charismatic megafauna. Obviously, these non-human animals are important in our human lives, and people write great things about them, many of which we’ve published. But we’re really excited to read about other less explicable creatures as well. Eco-writing as we see it can include minerals, fungi, forests, insects, fire, etc.

We’re eager to champion emerging voices and actively encourage writers historically underrepresented in magazine publishing and eco-writing to submit. We want to read writers who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA+ folks, gender-nonconforming people, people with disabilities, women, and others.

• Submit your work in .docx or PDF; Times New Roman, 12 point font. Double-space prose submissions. Single-space poetry is fine.
• Cover letters are optional for all genres except translation. 
• Please include content notes for any material in your submission for which you think readers may appreciate advance notice. Examples include: violence, sexual assault, racism, suicide, self-harm.
• We accept simultaneous submissions, but withdraw your piece on Submittable promptly if it is accepted elsewhere. If you have submitted multiple works, send a Submittable message to tell us which works you must withdraw. We do not publish previously published work at this time.
• Once you have submitted work, please wait to receive a response from our editors on that submission before submitting again. Please limit your submissions to once or twice a year. 
• We aim to respond within 6 months. If you have not heard from us after 6 months, feel free to reach out.
• Readers and editors of the magazine may not submit work.
• If your work has been published in The Dodge, we ask that you wait 12 months from your date of publication to submit again. 

_____________________________________________

Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land—A special teaching issue on Palestine and the Global Indigenous Struggle (January 2026)

Submissions open: June 1 – July 31, 2025.

Introduction by Guest Editor, Palestinian Poet Sara Abou Rashed

With over seventy-seven years of contestation, Palestine has turned global like never before—a cause of radical empathy, of impossible belonging and of forced disconnection from ancestral land and reckoning against an occupying power. For Palestinians, as well as any Indigenous peoples forcibly (re)moved, land is not merely territory—it is the vessel of generational memory, holistic connectedness in which the people and their earth are one and in the same, and collective, deeply rich and rooted identity.  It is this immense and unmeasurable loss of stolen land that keeps generations grounded in their pursuit of justice, in their reclamation of a mystical inheritance. 

This issue welcomes submissions exploring returns, roots, and land largely writ—be it physical, imagined, occupied, liberated, or in any possible condition which art and literature may make possible. This is a teaching issue across genres and languages committed to creating conversations around the curated works to enliven their mediums, extend their afterlife, as well as generate fruitful conversation toward solidarity.

We welcome submissions from Arab and Indigenous writers, artists, and educators in solidarity with Palestine in the following genres: 

• Poetry
• Fiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• Visual Art
• Translation
• Craft & Teaching Materials on Palestine and Indigenous Resistance

See genre-specific guidelines below.

As a special teaching issue, please note that we’re encouraging writers to submit accompanying educational materials with their creative submissions. This could include a list of questions, a brief craft reflection, a prompt, or template. (Contributors from all backgrounds are welcome to submit to our Translations and Craft & Teaching Materials genres.) Please contact us with questions: editors@thedodgemag.com