SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

As with our general submissions, we seek literary fiction that has an intelligent sense of language, assumes a degree of risk, and has consequence beyond the world of its narrators. We are drawn to vivid, fresh characters and plots we haven't seen before.

Before submitting, please note that all manuscripts must...

• be works of fiction: novels, novellas, or story collections.
• be under 80,000 words, not including the table of contents or an acknowledgements page.
• consist of a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
• be double-spaced, in 12-pt. Times New Roman font, with standard margins.
• be unpublished (portions of the manuscript, such as individual stories, may have appeared in other publications, but the manuscript as a whole must remain unpublished).
• contain no interior art or translations.
• contain no identifying information (a brief author bio / cover letter may be included in the "comments" section on our submissions manager).

Multiple entries are permitted, as long as you pay the applicable submission fee for each entry. Simultaneous submissions are also acceptable, but please notify us immediately if your manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere. If you need to withdraw your submission for any reason, please email inreview@indiana.edu. We regret that we are unable to refund submission fees in the event of a withdrawal.

Further, IR and IUP cannot consider work from anyone currently or recently affiliated with Indiana University. This includes those who have studied or taught at IU in the past four years.

Reading fee: $25, which includes a year-long subscription to Indiana Review. 

ABOUT DON BELTON

Don Belton is the author of the novel Almost Midnight (Morrow, 1986) and the editor of the anthology Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (Beacon, 1996). His short stories have appeared in the African American Literature Forum, Indiana Review, and Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Short Fiction (Penguin/Viking). He has written for Newsweek, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Advocate, Utne Reader, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He has lectured in the Ivory Coast (sponsored by ARTS America/United States Information Agency), at the Sorbonne, and the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has taught literature and fiction writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Bennington College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Indiana University. His awards include a Lila Wallace International Travel and Research Grant, a Bellagio/Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Artists Colony Fellowship, and a Dance Advance/Pew Charitable Trust Grant for Dramaturgy.

Don’s death in 2009 was a great loss to his friends, family, and students, and also to literature. The Don Belton Fiction Reading Period honors his memory and his legacy as a fiction writer.

We invite you to listen to Ross Gay read his poem, "Spoon," over on the IR Bluecast. "Spoon" is dedicated to Don Belton, and appears in Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).