Submissions
We welcome submissions of previously unpublished reviews, short essays, and poems, particularly poems with prose, narrative, or sequences in their sights, or poems with an environmental slant.
We're particularly keen to have short essays on poetic sequences. We don’t accept work that is simultaneously being submitted elsewhere. Before sending us material, please familiarise yourself with the journal to see if your work will jostle well with the other texts we’ve published.
How to send your work
We accept work only by email (not post/snailmail); please send submissions of work to Adam Piette using the following coded email address: <a DOT piette AT sheffield DOT ac DOT uk>. The submitted text(s) should be sent together as a single Word document (see the formatting guidelines below) that includes a short biographical statement at the end.
We like to receive submissions of two to five poems, or an extract from a longer work, accompanied by a brief biographical statement (150 words max). Once you’ve sent work to us, please wait until we’ve replied with a decision before you submit anything again.
Selection process
We aim to report back on submissions within 8-10 weeks. Given the large volume of contributions that we receive we can’t offer comments on rejected work. And because we’ve difficulty in tying our budget’s shoestrings, we regrettably can’t offer payment for texts that we accept.
Please also note that if we do publish your work in an issue, we would be grateful if you would wait for a further two issues to be published before submitting work for us to consider again - that is simply to ensure breadth and scope of representation in Blackbox Manifold.
Formatting guidelines for submissions
Don’t double-space text unless that’s how you want it to appear when published.
If submitting a text with footnotes or endnotes (eg, a review or essay) please don’t use Word’s footnote auto-insertion. Just add a numeral in the text where each note goes (1, 2, etc) then write out the numbered notes separately.
Please note that like most journals, if we publish your submitted work we may reformat aspects like style of heading and font so that it’s in our house style. If we don’t do this, each issue looks messy. We always send proofs before we publish, though, so you can check that everything’s in order with your page before it’s publicly accessible.