Happy Tuesday, readers, writers, and shark fans! In case you missed it, this week is SHARK WEEK, and it’s already thoroughly underway, and dare we say, “jawsome.”

Keep reading for where and how to watch (if you have some catching up to do, no judgment here!), as well as how we’re celebrating this week, and how you can use SHARK WEEK to submit to Issue 2 of Lit Shark: The SHARK WEEK Edition.

SHARK WEEK 2023 Details: Who, When, Where, What, Why, and How

Okay, so maybe we don’t have to answer ALL of those questions, but here are the details we have about where you can watch the show, when it airs, and also, what you can expect from the content this year.

SHARK WEEK 2023 started on Sunday, July 23, and it will run through this upcoming Saturday, July 29. We hope you’re considering submitting work to our Shark Week Issue, and submissions close on August 1 (but we’d technically be open to receiving submissions up through Sunday, August 6, to give you more time to revise your work if you so wish).

SHARK WEEK airs on the Discovery Channel (not Discovery Science), and it’s also available to stream on the Discovery+ app and MAX.

Each day, there will be three to four episodes, resulting in several hours of new shark goodness per evening. We’ll be popping popcorn, and cutting up a lot of veggies and fruit, to munch on throughout the festivities (not to mention taking notes and coming up with those creative writing prompts!).

Don’t Forget to Submit to Lit Shark’s Issue 2: The SHARK WEEK Edition!

This is your weekly, fin-tastic reminder to submit to Lit Shark Magazine for our upcoming issues! We’ve already received some amazing work to consider, and we’ve accepted a few pieces for Issue 2 AND Issue 3: Our Spooky (Teeth) Edition! But we definitely need more work to look at, so our next issues will be as JAWSOME as our inaugural one (sorry for the puns—but not that sorry).

Here are some details about Issue 2: We’re, of course, centering this issue around SHARK WEEK and hope we receive a lot of creative responses to this year’s SHARK WEEK content, but we are also VERY open to general submissions! If you have work you’re proud of, but you’re worried it will be turned away because it’s not focused on sharks, please note that most of the work in Issue 1 had very little, if anything, to do with marine life at all, and we’re incredibly proud of that issue. Issue 2 and beyond will be no different; just, sometimes, we like themes.

We’re looking for poetry, fiction, short nonfiction, and short plays at this time. You can find more details about page/word counts on our submission page. (And as a side note: If you have a young writer in your life who might want to share work with us, or if you’re a children’s/middle grade/YA writer yourself, please check out our details for submitting to Lit Pup Magazine, which have been updated!)

How You Can Use SHARK WEEK as Inspiration—And How We Will Help

Throughout the rest of SHARK WEEK, we will be posting once per day to recap our favorite moments and to offer you writing prompts based on those episodes. Sometimes it might be “include this cool factoid in your next story or poem,” and sometimes it might be “use this shark as metaphor,” etc.; you get the idea! Our creative writing prompts will be one day behind, so we’ll post one more time today to share our creative writing prompts for Sunday and Monday’s programs, and tomorrow, we’ll share today’s (Tuesday’s) programs, etc.

We’d like to see as many of your responses to SHARK WEEK as possible to make Lit Shark Issue 2: The Shark Week Edition as cool as possible. Again, not all of the work in the issue HAS to be centered around sharks and SHARK WEEK, but we would like that to be the focus of the issue. Whether you use our writing prompts throughout the rest of the week, come up with concepts of your own, or have other shark programs that we love (we’ve been watching a lot of episodes about the relationship between coral reefs and apex predators on National Geographic through the Disney+ app ourselves lately!), we want to see it all.

Happy watching, happy writing, and happy submitting! We can’t wait to celebrate SHARK WEEK with you and to read your submissions.