TSSF Journal seeks well-crafted stories about Africa, Africans, and African issues in all genres from writers of African descents or those associated with Africa. Send your poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction to journal@singlestory[dot]org. Email title should be: TSSF Journal: [Work Name], [category].

We accept all kinds of stories, whether genre or literary. Send us your speculative, thrillers, romance, comedy, Sci-Fi, magical realism, contemporary, historical, history, mystery, adventure, fantasy, etc. stories and poems. The editors for the new edition are Romeo Oriogun as Managing Editor, Temitope Shittu Alamu as Fiction Editor, Tolu Daniel as Nonfiction Editor and Murewa Olubela as Poetry Editor.

We do not offer a specific theme to adhere to. Therefore we would like a plethora of stories that deal with different themes. We welcome any story or poem, in any category or subject as long as it isn’t racist, sexist, or promoting hatred. We believe that anything, from speculative fiction to romance, to a queer space opera, can be a wonderfully well-written story or poem.

Submission should be sent as a .doc or .rtf attachment, one single document. Failure to adhere to this will result in rejection. Also, entries submitted in the body of the email will not be accepted. Your contact information, such as your name, address, phone, and email, should be in the body of the email. Your bio should also be included in the body of the email.

• TSSF Journal is published yearly. Our publication schedule is as follows:
  Submission period: 3 months. For this reading cycle, the period opens Oct. 1 and closes Dec. 31.
• Editing period: 3 months. Submitting to TSSF Journal is an opportunity to be mentored and workshop with other published writers and acclaimed editors. Your story, poem, or essay is your application. Our editors take your original, unpublished material – whether raw or polished – and turn it into the final version that pieces will be published in our journal. Expect a couple of going back and forth, receiving feedback each time with our editors.
  Laying and publishing: 1-2months.

As such, it is not uncommon for you to receive the status of your submission 4 months after it was submitted. If you have not heard from us since the initial confirmation email, please assume your submission is still under consideration. Please, do not send new work until we call for it.

We do not accept simultaneous or previously published works. If our 7-8 month publication schedule does not work for you, please do not submit to us. We wish to not be put in a position to reject pieces or have to remove works we have already worked on because it got published elsewhere. TSSF Journal will only accept one submission at a time from an author. We will automatically decline any additional submissions. We accept email submissions only. There is no submission fee. At this time, we do not pay our contributors.

Fiction:

• Submit work no longer than 6,000 words, double-spaced, written in Times New Roman or Cambria, 12 pt. font (no courier, please), and the pages numbered. Excerpts of longer works may be accepted; please include full work as well as an excerpt.
• PLEASE DO NOT include your name or contact information in the file name, header/footer or title page.
• Your complete submission should include at most a 100-word biography, included in the body of the email.
• Submissions not following the above guidelines will most often result in an automatic decline.

Poetry:

• Submit three to five original, unpublished poems in one single document. Poems must be written in Times New Roman or Cambria, 12 pt. font (no courier, please), and single spaced, except when space is a delibrate technique.
• Length and style are open-ended. Just send us your best work!
• PLEASE DO NOT include your name or contact information in the file name, header/footer or title page.
• Your complete submission should include at most a 100-word biography, included in the body of the email. Also, include the titles of your poems in the body of the email.
• Submissions not following the above guidelines will most often result in an automatic decline.

Creative non-fiction:

• We’re open to all types of creative nonfiction, such as immersion reportage, personal essay, memoir, etc. We, however, prefer submissions that are structured around narratives but we are open to works that break away from this general writing style.
• PLEASE DO NOT include your name or contact information in the file name, header/footer or title page.
• Submissions should be no more than 4,000 words, double-spaced, written in Times New Roman or Cambria, 12 pt. font (no courier, please), and the pages numbered.
• Submissions should NOT include your name or other identifying information.
• Your complete submission should include at most a 100-word biography, included in the body of the email.
• Submissions not following the above guidelines will most often result in an automatic decline.

We look forward to reviewing your submissions. Good luck!

What Type of Submissions Do We Want?

A well-written finished work! We just want good writing, doesn’t matter the category. Might seem a little on the nose to say, but workshopping your piece among friends before submitting it to us would work better than you submitting a piece you just finished last night.

Please check our last edition for examples of our previously published works as you consider submitting a piece to us. So, we emphasize that you send to us only well-developed, complete, and thoroughly revised works. So, we emphasize that you send to us only well-developed, complete, and thoroughly revised works.

We are open to all and sundry. So, wow us.

Formatting Guidelines

Please adhere to these styles and format as you write your stories and poems.

• File format: save your file as a DOC, DOCX or RFT file. Microsoft Word documents should not be locked or protected. DO NOT SUBMIT PDF DOCUMENTS
• Identifiers: do not include your name or any personal identifiers anywhere in your submission. We read blind.
• Spelling: use the British way. Yes, include the U.
• Font: use Times New Roman, 12pt
• Page size: use A4 size page
• Font style: do not italicize quotes or African words. Only use italics for book or anthology titles, or to emphasize a certain word or phrase. So not use underline and only use boldface for the title.
• Short story titles or book titles: italicize books, novels, collections, anthologies, book-length poems, or other larger works titles. The rule states that you italicize the title of any piece that stands alone as a single, unified. However, you put short stories or a single poem title in quotes.
  • To clarify: Tiah wrote This Day. However, her short story “Dislocated” has quote marks around it because it is a short story.
• Text color: only use black.
• Caps: do not use all caps.
• For titles, capitalize the first word of the title and all major words (lowercase articles, prepositions, and conjunctions).
  • Example: This is a Title in Title-Case Capitalization.
• And for the body, only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns.
  • Example: This is a title in sentence case.
• Space after a period: only have a single space after a period. Since you aren’t using a typewriter, there is no need for two spaces after every colon or period.
• Margins: all margins should be set to 1”. Margins can be set in Microsoft Word using the Page Layout tab on the main menu (PC) or on the formatting palette (Mac).
• Page number: should be at the top right-hand corner in Arabic numerals.
• Quotation marks: use slanted quotation marks (“ ”) and not straight quotation marks (“”)
• Dialogue/dialog: should be enclosed in quotation marks. Start a new paragraph when the speaker changes.
• Dash: use en dash (–) and not em dash (—). And do not use a hyphen to replace an en dash.
• Paragraph indicator: please do not indent your paragraphs. Instead, double return/have a space between paragraphs.
• Line break: center two asterisks on a line by themselves, with a single space before and a single space after. Do this for every line break, not just the ones that fall at the top or bottom of a page. Make sure all breaks are visible.
• Spacing and layout: double-space your text and do not use multiple columns
• Footnotes: Footnotes are not permitted
• Language: Manuscripts must be predominantly written in English.  We do not recommend explaining African words or phrases you use. However, we ask that you contextualize them.
• Abbreviations: Define abbreviations upon first appearance in the text. Do not use non-standard abbreviations unless they appear at least three times in the text. Keep abbreviations to a minimum.