Submissions are currently closed and will reopen in Fall 2024.
What We’re Looking For:
We look for new poets who have a fresh voice and nuanced perspective. When reviewing poetry submissions, our readers appreciate student work that feels concise and fully realized. We aim to publish poems which engage and excite our audience. Above all, we want to publish poetry that makes us feel something.
Poetry
After receiving submissions, poems are anonymized and each poetry reader reviews poems independently. In the following weeks, we hold several meetings with the full poetry team to consider the submissions. We examine the structure, content, and rhythm of each poem. During these conferences, we select about 10 poems to present to the full staff at a Capstone Meeting. There, all members of the Nassau Literary Review discuss the poems, and we compile a final list for publication.
Prose
What We’re Looking For:
We look for stories that inspire us, challenge us, and make us happy, sad, and angry. Stories that exemplify a given genre, stories that intersect genres, stories that subvert them, stories that evade the question of genre entirely. Stories that uphold traditions of prose and narrative. Stories that revolutionize them. Stories somewhere in between, that meditate on the nature of storytelling. Most of all, we are looking for stories that are concise, essential, and achieve what they want to achieve: to make us think a certain thing, to feel a certain way, to see the world the way you want us to see it.
Selection Process
Pieces are anonymized and read by groups of about six prose readers over the span of 2-3 meetings .Each reader submits votes on every piece they have read. Stories that receive a majority ‘yes’ or consensus ‘maybe’ vote move on to the second round of consideration, where the Head and Assistant Prose Editors read and discuss them. The editors present pieces they want to include and those that have received strong reactions at the Prose section capstone, before sending a further refined list to the full staff Capstone Meeting.
Essay
What We’re Looking For:
We publish critical essays, creative nonfiction/memoir, personal essays, book reviews, art criticism, photo essays, and any other form of nonfiction that writers would like to submit.
Selection Process
Each year, we recruit staff writers who contribute at least one essay per semester to the Nassau Literary Review. These essays are workshopped at regular meetings, receive peer feedback, and undergo several rounds of edits with the Head and Assistant Essay Editors before being sent for copyediting and publication.
We also accept guest essays: pitches, drafts, or completed pieces can be submitted to nasslit@princeton.edu at any time during the academic semester. Submitters receive extensive feedback from editors and are given opportunities to workshop and revise their pieces. Final pieces are published in the digital and print publications.
Art
What We’re Looking For:
We seek artwork of any and all media; art that makes us think, feel, and pause; art that asks questions or acts as a lens into our world. Please send in any photograph of your artwork, regardless of picture quality, and we will follow up with you later if your work is chosen. Our aim is to support and showcase a variety of student artists.
Selection Process
After compiling all email submissions from student artists, the Arts Team convenes to talk through each work and evaluate how it might operate within the publication. Team members are encouraged to share their perspectives, reflecting on how they experience the artwork and to what effect. Works that are unanimously liked are sorted into a ‘yes’ folder; works that are disagreed upon or require some kind of minor modification are sorted into the ‘maybe’ folder. Once we learn about the length and literary contents of the issue, we revisit the ‘maybe’ folder and determine which artworks most augment the issue. Finally, we present our selections to the full staff, including our suggestion for which piece should appear on the cover.