Category: Dispatches

Glossy Planet uses Duosuma (via Duotrope) to read submissions. Here’s how to send us your work.

1. Make a (free) Duotrope account

You’ll need a free Duotrope account to submit. Don’t worry, you don’t need a paid subscription.

2. Find our current challenge

Head to our Duosuma page, pick the challenge you’re submitting to, and hit Submit. Please note the deadline (submissions close on the 15th of each month) and the fee.

3. Fill in your info

• Name and address: This information is taken from your Duotrope account. Update it if needed.
• Mailing list: We recommend opting-in to our newsletter so you can be the first to know about new monthly challenges.
• Bio and cover letter: Keep it short. Think of the bio you’d want on our site if your piece wins. Cover letters should include your genre, a short intro, and any relevant publication history.
• Submission type: Select the genre that best fits your piece. If nothing quite fits, let us know how you’d define your work in your cover letter.

4. Add your work

Select “Add a piece to my list” to upload your work. Accepted file types are .doc, .docx, and .pdf.

Heads up: we do not publish reprints. We accept up to 1,000 words for prose or up to 2 pages for poetry.

5. Pay the submission fee

Our submission fee is $10. If you would like to submit more than one piece per contest, you’ll need to pay the fee each time. Once payment goes through, you’ll get a confirmation email and a receipt for your records.

8. Done!

You’ll hear from us in about four weeks. In the meantime, allowlist duosuma.com in your email so our responses don’t vanish into the spam void. You can check on the status of your submission on your Duosuma Submissions page.

While you wait, add our upcoming challenges to your calendar, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

At Glossy Planet, we want to publish work that makes us stop and feel something—but what does that actually mean, and what different forms can that take? Here is a collection of work across genres that interact with narrative, form, and genre in ways that lingered with us after reading. 

“Obit” by Victoria Chang

How do you describe grief? In “Obit,” Victoria Chang uses unexpected language to describe the experience of handling her mother’s false teeth: when she shoves the teeth into her mouth “having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier,” and her mother’s words were in a ring around her mouth “like powder from a donut.” These lines are deeply evocative and a little unsettling, a sentiment that is paid off again at the end: “I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.” This prose poem takes the shape of a short obituary, and the form complements and accentuates the meaning: we grieve those in obituaries, and this poem gives the narrator a way to grieve the pieces her mother left behind.

“Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” by Kathy Fish

Kathy Fish wrote this piece after the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting, and it’s a gut-punch that captures the ways in which language fails us. It has been described as a poem, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. (Fish said, “I think it’s sort of a hybrid piece, a prose poem. Doesn’t matter.”) The structure takes the reader on a very intentionally measured journey, starting from a place of safety and then shifting into something surprising, harrowing, and tragically familiar. 

“Problems for Self Study” by Charles Yu

This was one of the first stories I encountered in my undergraduate program that showed me what nontraditional forms could accomplish. “Problems for Self Study” is presented as a word problem that ostensibly follows the dissolution of a marriage, but it is also a metafictional exercise in how a story can shift depending on how you read it—is the plot actually happening, or is the protagonist using the word problem structure to explore one possibility out of all that could exist? (For more on this, read Brandon Williams’s essay on The Masters Review. Hi Brandon!)

“The Day I Named All the Flowers Beatrice” by Sophie Hoss

Flash fiction sometimes feels like a “I know it when I see it” situation, particularly because telling a story in less than 1,000 words can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But when it lands, oof, it packs a punch. This piece by Sophie Hoss clocks in at just 208 words, but it captures all the best parts of flash: it evokes a complete, concentrated world that points to complexities outside of itself, to borrow from Sadye Teiser’s definition. It begins with tension, and then shifts into a shared knowing—the reader, the narrator, and Beatrice know that they aren’t receiving the truth, but they accept the fabrication anyway.

“Swerve” by Brenda Miller

This brief nonfiction essay contains multitudes: deeply evocative language that starts with a single object, then pulls out to broaden the scope, becoming an essay about being in an abusive relationship and apologizing not only to the abusive partner, but also a younger version of the author’s self—the one stuck in that relationship. If “Swerve” also spoke to you, check out Brenda Miller’s story about how she wrote the piece.

Glossy Planet only publishes pieces up to 1,000 words (prose) or up to two pages (poetry), but I also wanted to shout out two nontraditional novels that have stuck in my brain ever since I read them:

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

I reviewed Metallic Realms when it was released earlier this year, and I still find myself thinking about this strange, hilarious, and occasionally devastating novel, which is a blend of autofiction, space opera, and Pale Fire meets Star Trek. We have a narrator who’s just a weird little freak, chapters interspersed with sections from the fictional writing group’s science fiction epic, and a storyline that not only laments what it means to be a writer today but also examines the power of obsession and creativity.

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

Canadian Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq is also an actor, visual artist, and novelist, and her 2018 novel Split Tooth blurs the boundaries between prose, poetry, and memoir. It follows a young Inuk woman growing up in the Canadian Arctic, but it also melds spiritual and physical worlds, and part of that melding happens through unexpected shifts in form as Tagaq explores Inuit identity, the impact of colonialism, and the legacy of historical trauma.

Send us your weird, urgent, and unconventional writing. View upcoming Glossy Planet challenges here.

Hello. Hi there. Hola. 

My name is Rebecca Paredes, and I’m here to welcome you to the launch of Glossy Planet, a literary magazine that publishes words as alive and unruly as the moment we live in. 

Like many of you, I occasionally* (*often) spend time doomscrolling and lamenting the state of the world—the persistent strife, the steady descent into disorder, the ever-looming threat of the world burning—and, as a creative person, this mindset is not super conducive to, you know, creating. Whether you are a poet, a writer, and/or a hybrid creative, you, too, may have experienced the following crushing and existential thought:

Why create anything when it feels like it won’t matter in the grand scheme of everything?

Reader, I get it. 

Maybe you create because you want to share something about how you feel. You create because it allows you to better understand yourself and the human condition—but creating feels harder when we think about the looming AI singularity, and microplastics intake, and what happens if we don’t pay attention to the check engine light because, honestly, we’re this close to crashing out. 

And yet, you feel that persistent pull to make something. You look at your notebooks and your Notes app full of jotted lines and snippets of conversation and think, “The seed is there, but I have yet to meaningfully water it, because I feel as though I live in a persistent drought.”

We know that people are writing and creating beautiful work. We know this because books are still being published, literary communities are still alive, and indie bookstores and libraries will save us all—but why do we write? How do we consider our work in the context of the endless barrage of tensions that exist today? What is the point in the face of all of those headlines?

The headlines, I would argue, are the point. 

We write, and we read, and we share what we write because art gives us ways to navigate emotions that sometimes feel too big to keep in our heads—and finding a community that responds to art is one way we retain our tether to what it means to be human. Empathetic, imperfect, creative humans.

I have this quote from the great Mary Oliver near my desk:

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” 

And that brings us to Glossy Planet. 

Glossy Planet exists to publish writing that responds to the world in real time: short, sharp, and urgent pieces that value impact over perfection. This is a space for writers to express their creative power by turning toward the world, not retreating from it. 

I often think about conversations I have with writers who want to respond to what’s happening in the world right now, but aren’t sure how. Writing prompts have always been an important part of my writing practice for exactly this reason: constraints give you a starting point, but also room to explore and respond. On the first of every month, we’ll have a new challenge for you to respond to. Challenges close on the 15th, and we’ll publish winners during the final week of the following month. First place wins $1,000, second place wins $200, and third place wins $100. 

For prose, send us up to 1,000 words. For everything else, send up to two pages. Our monthly challenges encourage writers to write and respond in two weeks—long enough to craft something that resonates with what we face today, in a short enough window that you won’t quite have time to agonize over every single word. That’s the point. We want the writing that feels like it sprung out of you, something that feels like you had to write this right now, in this moment, in whatever form works for your piece.

Big emphasis on that last part—“whatever form works for your piece.” If you’re a poet but feel called to write in flash prose, go for it. If you’re strictly a fiction writer but find that an epistolary essay is the only way that feels right to respond to a prompt, send it. If you’ve never published anything before, great. We want to read it.

We welcome all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, or something even genre goblins can’t categorize. If it’s urgent, sharp, and just a little weird, we want to read it. We’re looking for ​​anything under 1,000 words of prose or up to two pages of poetry that makes us stop and feel something. Keep an eye on our homepage for the release of our first challenge on Oct. 1, and add upcoming challenges to your calendar here.

Most importantly: Write like it matters. Because it does. 

Thanks for joining us on this ride.

Rebecca Paredes
Editor, Glossy Planet

This call for readers is now closed! Thank you for your interest. Follow us on social media to keep up with our latest updates and future calls for readers.

Glossy Planet is a brand new literary magazine looking for volunteer readers to join our editorial team. Every month, we drop a challenge tied to what’s happening in the headlines, the culture, and the moment. The pieces we publish are urgent, cross-genre, and impactful, and you’ll be joining us at the launch of our magazine.

How it works:

Glossy Planet exists to publish writing that responds to the world in real time. Our monthly writing challenges invite writers to make sense of the moment we’re living through, with themes ranging from AI and tech to climate change. 

First place wins $1,000, second place wins $200, and third wins $100. We move quickly, and we welcome work that is weird, unconventional, and genre-bending. We publish flash experiments, microessays, poems, lists, and more, all under 1,000 words of prose or two pages of poetry.

You’re perfect for this if:

• You can commit to 3-4 hours of reading per week. Due to our challenge schedule, our reading period generally runs during the second half of each month.
• You’re open to reading flash, micro-essays, lists, poems, and genre-defiant oddities.
• You’re an emerging writer, a grad student, or someone who likes being where the weird stuff happens first.

All reader positions are volunteer and remote.

How to apply

Send an email to contact@glossyplanetmag.com with:

• A short cover letter about you and what you’re reading right now
• A brief writing sample (any genre, under 1,000 words)
• Categories you’re most interested in reading
• Any experience with a submission management tool (Duosuma, Submittable)
• How you heard about this call for readers

Deadline: September 24, 2025