SL seeks original content
Sport Literate remains the nation’s lone literary journal focused primarily on the creative nonfiction exploration of sports. Founded in Chicago in 1995, we published our “25th Anniversary” issue in 2020. And we’re still at it dagnabbit! We’ve garnered regional awards and have been recognized in national anthologies. Check out the departments below that make up our standard issues. Please consider reading a back issue or two, too. You can learn more about what we like and don’t like, and save yourself $3.
A few things to keep in mind…
- We are not here to workshop your poem or essay, so don’t ask for feedback.
- Sometimes we will offer an encouraging note to “try us again,” or something like that. That doesn’t mean send us a revision of the same work (unless we specifically ask for that).
- We are less impressed by your bio, degrees, and titles than we are the wonderful reflections we end up publishing. Maybe put your work into the work.
- This has been a labor of love on our end, with no one making any money for nearly 30 years. Consider supporting this, or any other, small press publication. And with that, we are still likely to reject you at some point.
Who’s on First: This first-person essay begins each issue. Mark Wukas led off “Spring Eats 1997” with “Running With Ghosts,” an essay subsequently recognized in the Best American Sports Writing (BASW) anthology. Michael McColly’s “Christmas City, U.S.A.” won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council back in the day. Frank Soos was recognized in BASW in 2013 for his lead-off essay, “Another Kind of Loneliness.”
SL Travel: What did you learn as that stranger in a strange land? What’s the leisurely life like over there? Robert Parker’s travel piece, “The Running of the Bull,” was recognized in Best American Essays 2006.
Personal Essay: We’re hip to all the nonfiction forms — nature writing, immersion journalism — whatever floats your prose. Several Sport Literate writers have been cited in the annual Best American Essays (BAE) and the BASW collections. Mark Pearson’s essay, “The Short History of an Ear,” was our first to make the latter anthology’s pages. Cinthia Ritchie’s “Running” appeared there in 2013. Dave Essinger’s contest-winning essay from our 2013 issue, “Hallucinating in Suburbia,” received a nod in BASW. Katie Cortese’s essay, “Winning Like a Girl,” earned a similar recognition from BAE.
Poetry: If you don’t pick up a back issue, you can check out poems we’ve published in one of our newsletter archives. Please don’t send more than three poems at once.
Sport Shorts: We started a good thing with the flash nonfiction in our “20th Anniversary Issue.” Knock us out with your essay under 750 words.
Why the $3 reading fee?: Because, because, because. We wanted to eliminate buckshot submissions from a relatively painless submission process. At least peruse the website and see if you’d like to publish your work here. Anyone old enough to remember SASEs and trip to the U.S. Post Office knows three bucks is reasonable. It might help us offset the cost of Submittable.
Submit through the Submittable tool on our front page. Give us a couple of months, then check in as needed.
