We take a summer break every year, but this year we’ll be taking a longer one than usual. Since the end of last year, we have been receiving an incredibly high number of submissions to the magazine. This is GREAT news! We love reading your work and every day we are excited to get more of it in the mail. Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing: because of the high number of submissions, we haven’t been able to respond to you, our writers, as quickly as we’d like.

Prairie Schooner publishes work in the order that it is accepted, and right now, we have a large backlog of accepted work, causing a long delay between a work’s acceptance and its publication.

We feel that these two situations are unfair to those who submit to our magazine, and to those who are published here. In our 77th year of publication, Prairie Schooner remembers that our reputation was made by our writers. We value your work and your time--which is why we are taking this action.

What does this mean?

Please do not send us submissions postmarked between April 15th and September 1st, 2003. We will be returning all unsolicited submissions during that time.

We will use the time to catch up in our reading and to publish our already accepted work.

Please do send us your work after September 1st! We can’t wait to see it!

For further information, please e-mail us.