Happy Thursday, readers, writers, and shark fans! I hope you’ve had the most incredible week.

This past week has been the loveliest and most exciting whirlwind since Issue 1 of Lit Shark Magazine dropped. I’ve received so many messages from colleagues, contributors, and readers, voicing their excitement for the appearance of Issue 1 and its contents, and I’m incredibly grateful that people are finding the joy in the magazine that I’ve been feeling every time I sit down at my desk to work on it.

If you missed Issue 1 of Lit Shark Magazine, or you’d like to review the style of work we accepted, you can check it out (for free!) here!

While we’re still reveling in the joy of this first issue, I want to invite you to take part in our remaining issues for 2023.

Now that we have the details worked out, I want to release three more issues this year, and two of them are themed. Read below for the submission deadlines and the details for submission requirements (they’re brief; I like to leave most of the parameters to the writers!).

Lit Shark: Issue 2: The Shark Week Edition

Issue 2 Deadline to Submit: August 1, 2023
Poetry: Up to 5 poems or 10 pages
Fiction and Nonfiction: Up to 15 pages or 4500 words
General submissions are ALWAYS welcome, but this issue’s deadline comes right after Shark Week in July for a reason! For this issue, we’re especially interested in seeing pieces centered around summer or warmer weather, marine life, and all things Shark Week—whatever that means to you!

Also, if you need inspiration for responding to Shark Week, we’ll be doing a watch party each day on our website, including writing prompts after each episode (what we thought, what we learned, and fiction/poetry/journaling prompts to get viewers started).

Lit Shark: Issue 3: The Spooky (Jaws) Edition

Issue 3 Deadline to Submit: October 21, 2023
Poetry: Up to 5 poems or 10 pages
Fiction and Nonfiction: Up to 15 pages or 4500 words
Just like Issue 2, general submissions are ALWAYS welcome, but Issue 3 centers around the spooky season and will be released just in time for Halloween in the United States. More importantly, though, Issue 3 is your opportunity to let loose your wildest, campiest, and creepiest renditions of the shark genre; we’re talking Jaws and Sharknado and The Meg and Black Demon here. Lit Shark is deeply committed to conservation, preserving marine life, and debunking myths that are harming marine life (especially sharks, who generally are just giant sea pups, let’s be honest), but our team also understands the fun of sitting back with a giant bowl of popcorn and spilling half of it during the scary parts of some of these horror films.

Being our spooky issue, we also really want to see your spookiest and scariest stories, tales around the campfire, sirens and men lost at sea tales… You get the point. Let your imagination run wild, and send us your best!

Lit Shark: Issue 4

Issue 4 Deadline to Submit: December 11, 2023
Poetry: Up to 5 poems or 10 pages
Fiction and Nonfiction: Up to 15 pages or 4500 words
If you didn’t find your place in our Shark Week issue or our Spooky issue, our final issue of the year is open to general submissions. We just ask for minimal sexual content and expletives (and sharks portrayed as villains will be considered, but they’ll primarily appear in our annual spooky editions).

And that’ll be a wrap for 2023! Details for 2024 and 2023’s “Best Of” Anthology will come much later in the year.

I hope these issues are of interest to you. Submissions have already started to come in, and I’m excited to keep reading and churning through them as I did for Issue 1. And I want more of you lovely readers, writers, and shark fans to be directly involved in this publication. I can’t wait to see what you come up with for one of these issues—or all of them!