Reed Magazine seeks to celebrate the young voices of the San Francisco South Bay region. Submit your original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, photography, and scholarly works to share your creativity with readers of California's oldest literary journal.    

This contest is for high school students of Santa Clara County, California, ONLY.

Reed Magazine policies and guidelines:

• Our Emerging Voices Contest requires proof of local high school attendance to win.
• Submission cap: Please limit your submission to our free categories to two (2) per person during each open reading period. There is no limit to the paid categories.
• Use of AI: Reed Magazine honors the complexity and diversity of human creativity. Submissions that appear to be the product of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools will be declined. However, if you have a piece that interrogates the use of AI, we welcome it. Reach out if you have questions on this.
• Formal-play and genre-blending work: We love and encourage work that is both formally and generically playful. If this describes your work and you’re unsure which category to submit it to, submit to the one it more closely aligns to. You can add an explanatory note in your cover letter if the context would help us in our consideration. 
• Editorial process: Reed Magazine copy editors will review submissions accepted for publication to ensure consistency with our style conventions.
• We do not accept work that has been previously published (physically printed and distributed or digitally available to the public). We do accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify us if your work is selected for publication elsewhere.

Please be sure to: 

All submissions 

• provide a cover letter that includes your preferred first and given last names, name of the high school you attend, and genre you are submitting to (but exclude this information from the works themselves)
• include a brief bio, up to 50 words
• check that your Submittable profile is up-to-date

Fiction and nonfiction 

• save submissions as a Microsoft Word (.docx or .doc) or Portable Document Format (.pdf) document
• double-space text, and use an easily readable 12-point typeface (such as Times New Roman)
• number pages
• include word count (1,000-word limit)

Poetry 

• save submissions as a Microsoft Word (.docx or .doc) or Portable Document Format (.pdf) document
• single- or double-space text, and use an easily readable 12-point typeface (such as Times New Roman)
• number pages
• submit up to two (2) poems in a single file

Visual art and photography 

• include available art credits: title, medium, dimensions, year 
• render submissions in an easily accessible format, such as .jpg
• size submissions to at least 300 dpi
• submit up to two (2) works 

    Winner receives a monetary prize, as well as publication in and a free copy of the latest issue of Reed Magazine. Up to two (2) multiple submissions are accepted as separate entries. Contest submissions not selected for final judging may still be considered for publication in the journal and/or online. 

Emerging Voices Contest submitters can expect to hear back from Reed Magazine by the end of January 2027.