General Guidelines

You may submit up to 6 single-spaced pages of poetry per submission entry.  

         Submissions for this contest are "concealed." Please exclude your contact information—including name, email address, and mailing address—from your actual submission.    

        $1,500 Prize and publication in New Ohio Review 37 or 38. Pieces that are not selected will still be considered for publication. (Customarily, we publish 30-40 poems that were originally submitted as contest entries.) Entry fee comes with two print issues.      

________  

George Bilgere came into national prominence in 2002 when then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose his collection of poems, The Good Kiss, to win the University of Akron Poetry Prize. Collins then named Bilgere one of two Witter Bynner Fellows for 2002 and invited him to read at the Library of Congress. In 2006 Ed Field chose his book, Haywire, to win the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award, and radio host Garrison Keillor began reading Bilgere’s poems on his daily National Public Radio broadcast, The Writer’s Almanac. The popularity of Bilgere’s poems on the show led to an appearance on Keillor’s long-running NPR radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.

Bilgere’s many honors include the 2022 Readers’ Choice Award from Rattle Magazine and the 2021 Editor’s Choice Award from New Ohio Review. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pushcart Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. He has won the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

His poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, New Ohio Review, Field, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere.

Bilgere is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his lovely wife and two fine little boys.

You may submit one story per submission. Prose should be typed, double-spaced, and be no longer than 20 pages. Submissions for this contest are blind. Please exclude your contact information—including name, email address, and mailing address—from your actual submission. $1,500 Prize and publication in New Ohio Review 37 or 38. Stories that are not selected will still be considered for publication. Entry fee comes with two print issues.         ____

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. Absolution, a fourth Southern Reach novel, was published in 2024. (adapted from Jeff VanderMeer.com)

You may submit one essay/memoir per submission. 

      Prose should be typed, double-spaced, and be no longer than 20 pages.   

      Submissions for this contest are "concealed." Please exclude your contact information—including name, email address, and mailing address—from your actual submission.

      $1,500 Prize and publication in New Ohio Review 37 or 38. Pieces that are not selected will still be considered for publication. Entry fee comes with 1-year subscription (two print issues).      

____   

Sarah Viren is a writer, journalist, and translator. She’s the author of two books, Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, and To Name the Bigger Lie, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an NPR best book of the year; she also translated the novella Córdoba Skies by Federico Falco. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Viren teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University. Her work has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Goldfarb Fellowship, a Dora Maar Residency, and a GLCA New Writers Award, among others.

One story per submission. Prose should be typed double-spaced and be no longer than 20 pages. Cross-genre work, or any work that is unusually formatted, is welcome, but please be aware that our page width and font size are restricted. Please include your email address, mailing address, and the piece's genre at the top of your submission.     Please use a file type of .doc or .docx.  

Members may submit up to six times a year, even during non-reading periods. After you submit and pay this time, use "Subscriber/Member Submissions," which is free. 

Members will also receive the next two issues of NOR.

Up to six poems per submission. 

Please use a file type of .doc or .docx. Members may submit up to six times a year, even during non-reading periods. After you submit and pay this time, use "Subscriber/Member Submissions," which is free. 

Members will also receive the next two issues of NOR.

One essay per submission. Prose should be typed double-spaced and be no longer than 20 pages. Cross-genre work, or any work that is unusually formatted, is welcome, but please be aware that our page width and font size are restricted. 

  Please use a file type of .doc or .docx.    

Members may submit up to six times a year, even during non-reading periods. After you submit and pay this time, use "Subscriber/Member Submissions," which is free. 

Members will also receive the next two issues of NOR.

This portal is for SUBSCRIBERS TO of MEMBERS OF NEW OHIO REVIEW ONLY (unless you have heard specifically from us to use this method of submitting).

Subscribers or members who wish to submit a regular submission in any genre can do so for free (up to six times a year). In your cover letter, please let us know when you subscribed or became a member so we can cross-check our records. 

Please also specify the genre of your piece in the submission title. E.G: "Fiction: Wuthering Heights" or "Poetry: The Waste Land and Four Others."

Please use .doc or .docx file type.

Subscribers/members also have the right to submit during the summer months and during our winter break.

If you'd like to subscribe, check the subscription options at newohioreview.org. And please see our guidelines before you submit as well.

Thank you for your support.

If you'd like to submit artwork, please use this category and submit as many .jpgs as you'd like. Most often we will choose art for our online editions, but select pieces will be eligible to be placed on the covers of our bi-annual issues (published in fall and spring). Images for the online editions may be any size, but images to be considered for the cover of our print issue must meet the following criteria: 

Width: 13.5 in X Height: 8.5 in

We prefer cover art where the figure, scene, or object is set to the right-hand side of the image; this allows us to wrap the emptier left side of the image around the back cover, where we will also print contributor names. Please see examples here: https://newohioreview.org/2025/11/21/cover-art-examples/  We reserve the right to edit the image, in consultation with you, so that it fits our page.

Cover artists will receive $200 and 2 copies of their issue. We may be able to compensate artists for work that will appear online--especially if all parties agree that NOR will highlight several of an artist's images--but payment for art is case-by-case and budget-dependent.