decomp journal is a literary and multimedia journal grounded in social justice that is committed to curating art from marginalized communities.We are an in-house journal for the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.

If you have questions about the kind of work we accept please read over our Mission and About pages. We are interested in submissions where contributors do not to dull the edges of their art, because the violence of our time is not dull. We ask that artists not spare their readers, because life does not spare us. We assume creative acts as a responsibility to the community, to the powers of imagination, to memory, to story. To be more honest, we must be creatively ruthless.

We especially encourage submissions from marginalized voices, such as Queer, Trans* and Two Spirit writers as well as, Black, Indigenous, Writers of Color and those from the Global South. decomp is committed to centring your voices, please do not self-reject.

[Guidelines]

We invite submissions of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art/media. All submissions should be sent in using our online submittable platform.

• For poetry: You can submit up to 3 poems at a time
• For Prose: 8,000 words maximum. If you write pieces that are under 1,000 words, feel free to submit two.
• Art/other media: We accept art across all mediums as long as they can be uploaded in JPG, mp3 or mp4 files

We publish three issues a year and submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis.

We only accept previously unpublished work and yes, we consider websites, blogs, youtube channels, etc., as previously published.

We readily encourage simultaneous submissions, all we ask is that you notify us when another market accepts your work. If another market accepts one or more of your submissions [congratulations],  please write a note in Submittable instead of withdrawing the whole submission.

Submitters have the option of sending in a 3-4 line biography alongside their work. This is your chance to tell us a bit about yourself and your art. It is by no means a requirement. We ask for this because we want to give writers the ability to bring more of their full selves to the work that they publish. We are interested in you just as much as we are interested in your art. Feel free to include a link to your website and your email address, in the case that your work is accepted we will publish these as well unless you ask us not to.

We are a team made up of students and volunteers who try our best to respond to submissions sorta, kinda fast, while attempting not to fall into capitalism’s constant demand for productivity, so give us around 90 days.

[Payment, Edits, and Legal Matters]

Unfortunately, we cannot offer payment for accepted work at this time even though we really wish we could pay you.

If your work is accepted, it may be subject to minor editing and copyrighted upon publication.

For accepted work to be published, writers agree to automatically grant decomp First North American Serial Rights which means we will have the right to publish your work first, as well as Archival Rights which allows us to keep your work archived online (for-ev-er). Rights revert back to the author upon publication. If a piece of yours is reprinted online or in print, we ask that you please mention it appeared in decomp first.

We won’t ever share or sell your personal information, and we leave it up to you how much or how little of yourself you want to share along with your work.

We are excited to read, admire, and become enamoured with your submissions. Remember,  the creative tools handed down to us, the tools of resistance, have not  been forgotten. They have only undergone decomposition.