Meridian is an annual literary magazine produced at the University of Virginia in conjunction with the university’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, whose students serve as the magazine’s editors.
Founded in 1998, Meridian has featured the works of numerous Pulitzer Prize Winners, National Book Award Winners, and established writers including Rita Dove, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gregory Pardlo, Seamus Heaney, Lydi Conklin, Ann Beattie, George Garrett, Heather McHugh, Richard Bausch, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Celeste Ng, Laura van den Berg, Mark Strand, Cathy Song, and Eric Pankey. But don’t let the big names fool you. As a magazine edited by early career writers, we value nothing more than showcasing tomorrow’s talent, often publishing a new author’s first story or poem. We welcome and carefully read every submission that comes our way.
Meridian poetry and prose has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and New Stories from the South. Our stories have also been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize, and our fine authors and poets have won many awards.
In addition to fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Meridian also features author interviews and book reviews.
This submission pool is for general fiction submissions. Please do not submit your work here if you intend to send it to Meridian's Short Prose Prize or Editors' Prize in Prose.
Send us precarious stories, volatile stories, stories zinging with electric energy—whether absurdist parable or realist tragedy. Beyond aesthetic sensibilities, we're most interested in ambitious sentences and inimitable style.
Each submission should contain only one unpublished story. While we do not have a strict word count limit, though we rarely publish stories over 5,000 words. If you are sending flash or micro fiction, you may submit up to 3 stories of under 1,000 words in a single submission; please include all stories in the same document.
We do not accept work produced or edited using generative AI.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please withdraw your work immediately—directly through submittable—if it is accepted by another publication. We do not respond to email withdrawals.
We aim to respond to work within six-months.
This submission pool is for our poetry submissions only. Please do not submit your work here if you intend to send it to Meridian's Short Prose Prize or Editors' Prize in Poetry.
Send us poems steeped in the strange, the particular, the individual voice—the poem that could only be yours, that’s building its own world for itself. Give us your rarities, your experimentations with language and/or form, your poems that resist and retaliate.
Each submission may include up to five unpublished poems, totaling no more than ten pages. Please submit all poems in a single file.
We do not accept work produced or edited using AI.
Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please withdraw your work—directly through Submittable—if your work is accepted elsewhere. We do not respond to email withdrawals.
This submission pool is for nonfiction submissions only.
We're looking for essays that tickle the heart and mind, whether structurally innovative or composed with a formal vigor. While we do not have a strict word count limit, though we rarely publish pieces of over 5,000 words.
We do not accept work produced, edited, or iterated by generative AI.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please withdraw your work immediately—directly through Submittable—if it is accepted by another publication. Please do not email us with your withdrawals.
The winner of our annual Editors' Prize in Prose will receive $1000 and publication in the issue. Winning submissions may also be featured on the Meridian website.
The winner will be announced in March.
Guidelines:
- Submissions are read blind. Do not put your name or any identifying information on your submission document or in the file name.
- Prose writers may submit one story or essay of 5,000 words or fewer in each submission.
- No previously published work, including self-published work, will be accepted.
- You may submit a maximum of two entries per genre—no more than two prose submissions and/or two poetry submissions.
Eligibility:
- UVA MFA students, UVA MFA alumni, and former Meridian staff are NOT eligible.
- Current UVA students, staff, and faculty are NOT eligible.
- Friends, relatives, and former teachers and students of current Meridian staff or its advisor are not eligible.
- Former Meridian Editors’ Prize winners are not eligible to enter, even if their win was in another genre.
- Authors with two or more published books are not eligible. This does NOT include chapbook publication but does include self-published books. (If it’s been for sale and it was not a chapbook, it counts as a publication!) You may enter our prose contest if your published books were in poetry, and vice versa.
The winner of our annual Editors' Prize in Poetry will receive $1000 and publication in the issue. Winning submissions may also be featured on the Meridian website.
The winner will be announced in March.
Guidelines:
- Submissions are read blind. Do not put your name or any identifying information on your submission document or in the file name.
- Poets may submit up to four poems that do not exceed ten total pages. Please put all the poems in one document. No previously published work, including self-published work, will be accepted.
- No previously published work, including self-published work, will be accepted.
- You may submit a maximum of two entries per genre—no more than two prose submissions and/or two poetry submissions.
Eligibility:
- UVA MFA students, UVA MFA alumni, and former Meridian staff are NOT eligible.
- Current UVA students, staff, and faculty are NOT eligible.
- Friends, relatives, and former teachers and students of current Meridian staff or its advisor are not eligible.
- Former Meridian Editors’ Prize winners are not eligible to enter, even if their win was in another genre.
- Authors with two or more published books are not eligible. This does NOT include chapbook publication but does include self-published books. (If it’s been for sale and it was not a chapbook, it counts as a publication!) You may enter our prose contest if your published books were in poetry, and vice versa.