Detailed Guidelines - Nonfiction/Articles & Reviews
DesiLit Magazine seeks thought-provoking nonfiction articles and essays. Submissions must focus on issues that concern the global South Asian community and can be from anyone with an interest or a perspective.
What We Want
- While we invite submissions from a wide range of viewpoints, we will be most supportive of articles that reflect the political and aesthetic values of DesiLit as a whole: anti-communal, progressive, and experimental
- We look for work outside traditional definitions of South Asian culture, style and politics
- As long as it is readable and original, we will accept articles in any subject area. Essays, political/social/travel feature articles, and photo essays are all welcome for submission. Book/film/theater reviews should be submitted to the Reviews Department instead.
Types of Articles
We publish two types of articles:
- A short article should be approximately more than 600 words. The majority of the articles we publish will be short articles. We pay $25 for each short article.
- A long article should be approximately 1200 to 2000 words, however it is upto our discretion what we consider a long article e.g. a piece that is stretched to just break the 1200 word limit and which with proper editing would be a shorter piece, will be considered a short article. We pay $100 for each long article.
Generally, if you have an idea for an article (especially a long article), we recommend that you run it by us before getting started. Authors may submit completed articles or abstracts (200-250 words) for future articles.
How to Submit
To submit, send your article in plain text format in the body of an email (no attachments, please) to articles@desilit.org. For the subject line of your email please use the following subject line: Submission Articles: [Insert Your Article Title]. In the email, please include your complete contact information, including telephone number, and a short bio about yourself (100 words maximum) which includes your publishing history.
Edited articles will be sent to authors for a final review except in the case of standard spelling/grammar editing changes. We accept simultaneous submissions, provided you let us know immediately in case it is being published elsewhere. We will attempt to acknowledge every submission, and will contact authors within two months if we decide to publish your work. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, and the editorial board reserves sole discretion to choose publication date. All submissions must be original and previously unpublished. All editing and publication decisions are made by a collective editorial board.
Thank you for your interest!
For more information, please contact Sumita Sheth, Executive Editor.