Submission Guidelines

Eating disorders, body shame, and food phobias can exhibit differently across communities and cultures.

Unfortunately, fear is a common element.

With Dear Fear we aim to create a collection of lyric work that connects and inspires. Our container for this work is simple: a letter to the food feared and how it no longer haunts the writer. We chose this constrained form, merging a letter (epistle) and an address to a non-living thing (apostrophe), to bring our writers’ voices into the same room, where we can hear each other, beyond the characteristics that culture says should divide us.

For an excellent definition of fear foods and their role in recovery, please read registered dietician Caroline Young’s article on that topic.

Submit Your Work to Dear Fear

Submission window: August 1, 2026–October 15, 2026

Dear Fear is a collection of inspiring messages from people in eating disorder recovery. We welcome emerging writers and artists, and we particularly encourage submissions from communities that have historically faced resistance to representation, including LGBT+, BIPOC, and disabled communities.

We also recognize the relative lack of literature by men about eating disorders and recovery. We hope Dear Fear can help correct that imbalance by making space for their voices.

We welcome submissions from writers and artists at all stages of their careers.

What We're Looking For

We welcome:

  • Creative Writing — Prose: One essay, story, or other work of prose under 2,000 words.

  • Creative Writing — Poetry: One to three poems, with a maximum of 45 lines per poem.

  • Visual Art and Hybrid Work: Up to five images.

  • Series and unified works: If you are submitting a series, triptych, poetry cycle, or other unified grouping, please tell us in your cover letter.

We are unable to accept hybrid works involving video, music, or other streaming content at this time.

We cannot accept material generated by artificial intelligence.

How to Submit

Please submit the following to our online submissions portal (prose/poetry) or to our online Google form (visual):

1. A cover letter
Your cover letter should include:

  • The title(s) of the work you are submitting

  • What type of work you are submitting (prose, poetry, visual art, or hybrid work)

  • A short author or artist bio written in the third person

2. Your work as a Word document
Please use a readable 12-point font such as Times New Roman or Garamond.

For prose, please double-space your work unless alternative spacing is necessary as part of an experiment with form.

3. Images, if you are submitting visual or hybrid work
Please submit JPG/JPEG files that meet the following specifications:

  • 1,200 pixels on the longest side

  • sRGB color space

  • JPG/JPEG format only

  • File naming: FirstName_LastName_1.jpg, FirstName_LastName_2.jpg, etc.

A Note About Access

We will make accommodations for submissions from justice-involved or unhoused writers and artists, as well as people submitting on their behalf.

If you need an accommodation or have questions about submitting, please use the contact form on this website or email the editors at editors@dearfearcollection.com.

Submission Fee

The submission fee is $3. We will waive this fee upon request.

We also offer optional editorial feedback from our editors:

  • Poetry editor Danielle Coffyn

  • Nonfiction editor Maggie Russell

  • Visual editor Roula Seikaly

The editorial feedback fee is $30.

All submission and editorial feedback fees are used to help pay our contributors.

Payment

Thanks to the supporters of Dear Fear, we will offer a modest honorarium for accepted work.

Before You Submit

Simultaneous Submissions

We welcome simultaneous submissions. Because of the time involved in reviewing work, however, we ask that you notify us promptly if your work is accepted elsewhere and withdraw it through Duotrope's system.

Previously Published Work

We cannot accept previously published work.

By “published,” we mean work for which another organization or individual has established rights. We do not consider work published on a platform you control—such as a personal blog, newsletter, or social media account—to be previously published for purposes of this call.

If we accept your submission, we will ask you to remove copies of the work from platforms you control.

Response Time

We aim to respond to submissions within three months.

Questions?

Please direct all queries and correspondence to the editors:

editors@dearfearcollection.com

Thank you for your interest in Dear Fear.

If you'd like to support the anthology and the costs of our work, please consider contributing to our tip jar.

— The Editors

Prose Submissions
Visual Submissions