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.

We are seeking creative nonfiction that follows the epistolary form addressed to a specific food or dish. We currently only accept work through our submissions portal on DuoTrope.

Our submission window is August 1, 2026, to September 30, 2026.

We welcome emerging writers and encourage submissions from communities who have historically faced resistance to representation, including LGBT+, BIPOC, and those living with disabilities. We also acknowledge the lack of literature from men on this topic and note our intent for Dear Fear to help correct that trend.

We will make accommodations for submissions from justice-involved or unhoused writers (or those acting on their behalf). Please use our contact form on this website for inquiries.

We are open to hybrid or experimental forms. However, we have the following constraints on formatting:

  • Please submit your work as a Word document.

  • Use a readable font (Times New Roman, Garamond, etc.) in 12-point.

  • Prose: please send only one essay at a time, under 2000 words. Please double-space your work (unless alternative spacing is necessary if you are experimenting with form).

  • Poetry: please send one to three poems with a maximum of 45 lines. If you are submitting a series, triptych, or poetry cycle, or other unified grouping of work, please indicate that information in your cover letter.

  • Art and hybrid work: For work that combines photos, artwork, and text, such as hybrid, visual essay, image-text, visual narrative, multimodal, and mixed media, at this time, please send one to six images at one time in a format that is generally readable (such as jpeg). We will ask for higher resolution images upon review. We understand that specific dpi and file size criteria can be a challenge for this kind of work. For inquiries about specific file sizes, please use the contact form on our website.

  • We are not able to accept hybrid works involving video, music, or other streaming content at this time.

  • We cannot accept any material generated by artificial intelligence.

Our submission fee is $3. This fee is used to pay our contributors.

We also offer the option of editorial feedback from our poetry editor, Danielle Coffyn, our nonfiction editor, Maggie Russell, and our visual editor, Roula Seikaly. Our editorial feedback fee is $30. This fee, like our submission fee, is used to pay our contributors.

We welcome simultaneous submissions, but due to time constraints, appreciate prompt notification if your work is accepted elsewhere by withdrawing it within DuoTrope’s system.

It is our aim to respond to submissions within three months.

Please provide a cover letter, indicating the content you are submitting, including the titles, and a short author bio in the third person.

We are unable to accept previously published work. By the term “published” we mean work where another organization or individual has established rights to the work, we do not mean work that has been published on a platform you control, such as a blog, newsletter, or social media site. Should we accept your submission, we will ask you to remove all copies.

All queries and correspondences should be directed to the editors at 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 adding to our tip jar.

— The Editors