Featuring new work from: Geri Doran, A. R. Zarif, Samantha Edmonds, Amy Stuber, Kerry Folan, Mason Andrew Hamberlin, and more!. Plus: Winners of the 2018 Illinois Emerging Writer Awards and Winners of the 2019 Ninth Letter Literary Awards!

Ninth Letter will be accepting submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for our Summer 2020 web edition.  Submissions will be open from January 24 to March 20.

The theme for this issue is Debts. To what are we beholden? Of course mortgages, student loans, credit cards and car payments. And with them the fraud and inherent large-scale crises that extract from and shape generations in unique ways. But also our loved ones and colleagues, the earth and the seasons, inventions and collectives, and ancestors as well as strangers. What do we owe, and to who or what is it owed?

Submit your work for this special feature at ninthletteronline.submittable.com.

Nominees Announced!

We're delighted to announce that 9L has nominated the following works from our Spring/Summer 2019 and Fall/Winter 2019-20 editions for The Pushcart Prize XLV:

Spring/Summer 2019 (vol. 16 no. 1, published May 2019)

Michael Torres, "The Pachuco Himself Considers the Audacity of Language" (poetry)

Jacob Aiello, "Units of Measurement" (creative nonfiction)

Alex McElroy, "The Cruise" (fiction)

Fall/Winter 2019-20 (vol. 16 no. 2, forthcoming December 2019)

Samantha Edmonds, "The Adventures of Earthgirl and Starboy" (fiction)

Jenny Tinghui Zhang, "Party Trick Chinese" (creative nonfiction)

Adam Meisner, "Fourteen Translations for a Line from Barthes' Incidents" (poetry)