Last Call for Submissions
The Beatdom #25 deadline is approaching.
As many of you will know, Beatdom #25 is going to be released later this year. This issue will be devoted to the San Francisco Renaissance and we aim to release it on October 7, marking the 70th anniversary of the 6 Gallery reading.
For this issue, we are open to essays, reviews, and interviews concerning the San Francisco Renaissance. Defining literary movements is notoriously difficult but we always interpret our themes liberally, so feel free to take the topic in the loosest sense. Naturally, many writers we associate with the Beat Generation did not consider themselves “Beat” and likewise we are happy to consider essays on writers based in or around San Francisco in the mid-1950s regardless of whether they really viewed themselves as part of any movement. (Robert Duncan, for example, scorned the whole thing: “The term that later got applied—the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’—in the first place shows that someone didn’t know what a renaissance was at all. What did it mean? That we revived the Yukon poets or something?”)
Some writers active in that place and time include Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, ruth weiss, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure. Any of these would make an excellent subject for a contribution to Beatdom #25. We are always keen to publish work on underappreciated and overlooked artists as well, so do not feel submissions have to be focused on the most famous writers. We are also open to work concerning the visual artists associated with the movement, such as Jay DeFeo, Deborah Remington, Wally Hedrick, Jess, and Joan Brown. Other ideas for essays include places, events, publications, and politics.
We also consider poetry, short fiction, memoir, and artwork although we publish comparatively little of these compared to the aforementioned essays, reviews, and interviews.
The deadline is August 1st. Please send your query or submission to editor@beatdom.com. Further details can be found on our website: https://www.beatdom.com/submission-guidelines/
I should mention as well that we are also open to submissions for Beatdom #26, which is the Allen Ginsberg centennial edition. That will come out on Ginsberg’s 100th birthday in June 2026. We will be reading submissions until the end of March. If you need inspiration, check out our most popular back issue—the Kerouac centennial issue from 2022.