As a magazine founded and ran entirely by college students, our focus is on fellow young adults and college students. To submit, you must belong to at least one of the following two groups:
Adults ages 18-25, regardless of college enrollment status
Currently enrolled college students, regardless of age
We are open to writers of all experience levels. No minimum or maximum publication history is required.
We are looking primarily for works that fall in line with the Mission Statement of Bittersweet Magazine. Specifically, we are looking for works that explore themes of mental health or emotional hardship, with an emphasis on themes of duality—for example, hope and realism, nostalgia and melancholy, justice and spite, etc. How this manifests is up to the author, and we will be generous in our interpretation, but we may choose not to accept a work that feels insufficiently aligned with the themes of the rest of the magazine.
We accept work in three categories:
Poetry & Flash Fiction
Fiction
Creative Non-Fiction
Submissions must be limited to two works of poetry/flash fiction with a maximum of 350 words each, and a maximum of 6,000 words of fiction/creative non-fiction.
Works must be submitted in either .PDF or .docx file format.
We do not currently offer compensation for accepted submissions.
We will not accept work that has been previously published, with an exception for work that has been entirely self-published, such as on social media.
All works will be reviewed by the editors. We reserve the right to both deny acceptance or retroactively remove any accepted submission for any reason.
Works that appear to be generated by AI such as ChatGPT will not be accepted.
