You’ve got until September, so dust off that piece that’s seen too many rejections and get to work. In three months, give it another go and consider Gulf Coast. Founded in 1986, this is the literary journal of the University of Houston’s creative writing program. Phillip Lopate and Donald Barthelme founded the journal, which has expanded to two print issues as well as its online publications. The journal publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, and reviews as well as full-color portfolios of artists along with art criticism. Pieces are selected by a large staff of editors and staff editors—all of whom are students at the university. As I’ve written in earlier posts on literary journals, it can be encouraging when all the editors are students rather than faculty because developing writers may be more open to experiments with style and genre.
The journal also runs a monthly reading series in a Houston art center and throws a Spring Release Party, both of which add points in my book because they’re contributions to the larger community, increasing accessibility and visibility for writers and readers who may not otherwise be into literary journals or feel welcome on a university campus. They’ve also got several contests if you’ve got a bigger chunk of change burning a hole in your pocket.
One point against the journal, however, is that the Gulf Coast website doesn’t offer bios for any of their editors, which means the editors themselves miss out on an opportunity to promote their careers to Gulf Coast readers, and it also makes it harder to figure out the diversity in terms of gender and race. A few Google searches showed up some Latinx and Pakistani-American representation and respectable gender parity, but it’s important to remember that with student-run literary magazines the masthead changes every two years, or sometimes every year.
Their reading period runs September 1 through March 1, and while they charge $3 for each submission, they also are a paying market. They’ll look at anything under 7,000 words for print issues and under 3,000 words for online work. They also seem open for pitches if you have a unique writing project, such as travel writing or part of a graphic novel. That last one I haven’t seen listed often for literary journals, especially academic ones, so hey, another point for Gulf Coast.
The online writing I checked out is solid, quiet work with a subtle twist that complicates everything that came before. Verisimilitude and interiority rule here. Marne Litfin’s comic “Relationship Postmortem #1” is a great example, walking us through all the stages of post-breakup pain in just a few panels. If you want something a little darker, Gen Del Raye’s short story “Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994” delivers an ending I did not expect and that will leave you wanting to re-read the entire piece.
I also have to point out that Sharon Olds published a poem in Gulf Coast in 2022. If you know contemporary American poetry, you know Sharon Olds, so consider my mind officially blown. Gulf Coast is definitely not small potatoes, and the student editors who selected her poem for publication must have fallen all over themselves when they figured out who’d written it (many journals mask names so that readers and editors don’t know whose work they’re reading during the selection process). Basically? Send your very best work if you want a shot at publishing here.
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Featured Photo by Roudy Salameh
The Trailer Park MFA 