At Bloom, we believe it is never too late to take a risk and try something new. In that spirit, we are excited to announce that we are now accepting poetry and fiction submissions from blooming authors who first publish or publish in a new genre (for example, a novelist who publishes a poem, an academic who publishes a short story) at forty or later.
- Please send your submissions of no more than 2,500 words to submittobloom@gmail.com. For poetry submissions, multiple poems with a total word count of 2,500 can be submitted at the same time.
- In the subject line, include your last name and indicate whether your submission is fiction or poetry.
- Include a short cover letter with a bio that acknowledges that you are 40 over older at the time of submission. We will not consider submissions that do not include this acknowledgment.
- For safety and security, we cannot click on links or open attached documents, so include your submission in the body of the email.
- Only one submission to Bloom at a time. Wait until we respond to your submission before submitting to us again.
Thank you in advance for submitting your work. We are an all-volunteer publication, and regretfully cannot pay for publication. The author retains copyright. We will strive to respond within three months.
About the Journal
Welcome to Bloom — a literary site devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older. Bloom is also a community of artists and readers who believe that “late” is a relative term, not an absolute one, and who are interested in bringing to attention a wide variety of artistic paths — challenging any narrow, prevailing ideas about the pacing and timing of creative fruition. If someone is labeled a “late bloomer,” the question Bloom poses is, “Late” according to whom?
The age of 40 is in some ways an arbitrary marker; we use it flexibly, as more of a guidepost than a cut-off, recognizing that the stories we’re interested in, the life journeys, are complicated. Consider Toni Morrison, and George Eliot, both of whom published their first book-length works of fiction at age 39. Or Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago: he published a first novel in 1947, at age 25; then did not publish again for 19 years, and did not publish another novel until 1980, at age 58.
Bloom is for writers and artists of all ages and stages, for anyone who believes that the artistic journey is, and should be, as particular and unique as each one of us; that there is no prescribed beeline to literary achievement.
See what others are saying about Bloom at the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, the LA Times’s Jacket Copy, The Atlantic, and Flavorwire. Also, read this interview with Founding Editor Sonya Chung at The Huffington Post.