Submissions

Submission Guidelines

Our submission portals are currently closed. Our last submission window of 2026 will be from October 1-14. Read the submission guidelines below and then send us your general solarpunk. This is also the last submission window we’ll be accepting work for our special Solarpunk Horror issue. See more on “solarpunk horror” below.

All submissions to Solarpunk Magazine are done via Moksha. Any submissions received via email will be deleted without a response. Please don’t email us to describe your story and ask if it’s something we’d be interested in before submitting. We appreciate the consideration, but its easier if you just submit the story through Moksha.

Generally, we are looking for stories between 1,500 and 4,000 words. Our word limit remains 7,500 words, but 1,500 and 4,000 words hits our sweet spot.

Please read the full submission guidelines below or on our Moksha page before submitting your work. All submission periods end at 11:59 pm PST on the 14th of their given month.

2026 Themed Issues

July 2026: Colorful Roots (our fifth annual all-BIPOC issue)
November 2026: Solarpunk Horror (see below for more info)

2026 Issue Release Schedule:

Issue #25 – January 13
Issue #26- March 10
Issue #27 – May 12
Issue #28 – July 14 (Colorful Roots)
Issue #29 – September 15
Issue #30 – November 10 (special theme – Solarpunk Horror)

2027 Themed Issue
July 2027: Colorful Roots (our 6th annual all-BIPOC issue)
September 2027: Stories of Accessible Futures (see submission call below for more info)

2027 Magazine Submission Window Schedule:
January 1-14
April 1-14 (Stories of Accessible Futures submission window)
July 1-14
October 1-14

2027 Issue Release Schedule:
Issue #31- January 12
Issue #32- March 9
Issue #33- May 11
Issue #34- July 13 (Colorful Roots)
Issue #35- September 14
Issue #36 – November 9

SUBMISSION CALL: STORIES OF ACCESSIBLE FUTURES

Submissions for this special issue will be accepted during our April 2027 submission window.

Imagine a Future Designed with Everyone in Mind
What would our communities, cities, technologies, and cultures look like in a future where accessibility is a foundational principle of how we built our world? What if accessibility wasn’t something we had to fight for, something added as an afterthought, or available only to those who could afford it? What if the needs, experiences, and perspectives of disabled people were central to imagining and creating better futures from the very beginning?

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Solarpunk imagines futures where humanity has made meaningful progress toward ecological sustainability, social justice, and more equitable ways of living together. These futures are neither perfect nor free from conflict. They’re worlds in which people have begun to build something better.

For this special issue, we’re particularly interested in stories that imagine what happens when accessibility is understood as an essential part of creating those better worlds. Accessibility should be baked into the foundations of your setting, shaping everything from the built environment and technology to social institutions, cultural practices, and relationships. We want to see what kinds of stories become possible when accessibility is an ordinary, fundamental feature of life rather than an exceptional achievement.

But as always, compelling stories must come first.

We’re not just looking for amazing, accessible worldbuilding, we’re looking for memorable characters with desires, fears, flaws, and contradictions. We want meaningful relationships, difficult decisions, emotional stakes, and character arcs that change the people involved. Accessible utopias still contain disagreements, conflicting needs, competing values, personal struggles, mysteries, adventures, romances, and hard choices. Building a better world doesn’t eliminate the conditions that make stories interesting.

Some possibilities to explore

These are suggestions intended to spark your imagination, not a checklist of required subjects.

• Accessible cities and communities: Urban and rural environments designed from the beginning for diverse mobility, sensory, cognitive, and communication needs.
• Collective care and interdependence: Communities in which care is shared, valued, and supported through social infrastructure, without sacrificing personal agency.
• Technology and autonomy: Open-source assistive technologies, accessible interfaces, adaptive tools, and innovations developed and governed by the people who use them.
• Ecological adaptation and disability justice: Communities responding to climate change and environmental challenges in ways that recognize disabled people as essential participants, leaders, and experts.
• Work, creativity, and contribution: Futures that have dismantled harmful assumptions about productivity, labor, ability, and human worth.
• New social structures: Approaches to education, governance, healthcare, housing, and resource distribution that place accessibility and equitable participation at their center.
• Culture, art, and communication: Imagined societies where diverse sensory experiences, ways of thinking, and modes of expression have helped shape cultural life.
• Conflict within better worlds: Tensions between individual and collective needs, conflicting access requirements, generational disagreements, and the difficult choices involved in maintaining an equitable society.
• Adventure, mystery, romance, and everyday life: Stories in which disabled characters pursue ambitions, fall in love, solve problems, take risks, make mistakes, and experience the full range of human life within accessible futures.

We especially welcome stories that explore intersections between disability, race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and other dimensions of human experience.

Who can submit?

This anthology is open exclusively to writers who identify as disabled. We welcome submissions from writers with physical, sensory, intellectual, developmental, cognitive, psychiatric, chronic health, and other disabilities, including neurodivergent writers who identify as disabled.

We recognize that disability is experienced and understood in many different ways, and that not everyone uses the same language to describe themselves. Self-identification is sufficient. We will never require any kind of medical documentation or disclosure of diagnoses. Writers may be previously published or unpublished. We welcome a wide range of voices, perspectives, and storytelling traditions.

Submissions for this issue will be accepted during our April 2027 submission window (April 1-14), and this issue will be published in September 2027. Please see the “Submission Basics” section below for specifics on word count, payrate, etc.

We are committed to making the submission process accessible. If you encounter an accessibility barrier or need an alternative method of submitting your work, please contact us at info@solarpunkmagazine.com.

Submission Basics

If your work is accepted, please wait two full submission windows before submitting again. For example, if you receive word in April that your story is accepted, please do not submit during the May and July open windows, but feel free to do so once the September window opens.

Simultaneous submissions: Yes, but please let us know immediately if your submission gets accepted elsewhere before you hear from us.

Unsolicited reprints: No

Translations: Yes

Multiple Submissions: No, not within each category. But you can enter one submission per category per submission period. For example, you can submit one short story, poetry, and a nonfiction article all in the same submission window using each individual submission portal.

Policy on Artificial Intelligence

We recognize that there is a lot of positive potential for human societies in the development and use of technologies such as artificial intelligence. We also recognize that there is a lot of justifiable concern over generative AI, data scraping, plagiarizing human created art and literary works, and the potential for AI to displace human artists and authors from their jobs as a means of further enriching oligarchs and techbros.

Solarpunk Magazine is and will remain a venue for human authors and artists to showcase their work. As a result, we’ve implemented a strict policy:

1. We do not accept any work created or altered by generative artificial intelligence programs such as, but not limited to Midjourney, Dall-E, Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT.
2. We do not use any generative AI tools in the course of our editorial work.

For a more in depth explanation of the reasoning behind this policy, please click here.

Basic Formatting:

•12 pt Times New Roman or comparable font
•Double spaced (poetry does not need to be double spaced)
•Indent paragraphs, no extra space after paragraphs (also not relevant for poetry)
•Please number your pages
•.doc, .docx, or .pdf for text files
•.jpg or .png 300+ DPI for image files

Pay Rates:

Solarpunk Magazine pays above the professional market rate for fiction as defined by SFWA. Dollar amounts reflect the United States dollar (USD).
Our rates are as follows:

Fiction: 10 cents per word
Poetry: $50 per poem
Nonfiction: $100 per essay or article
Cover Art: $100 for reprints, $200 for original unpublished
Interior Art: $50 for reprints, $100 for original unpublished

If your submission is accepted, a copy of our publishing contract will be emailed to you to read, sign, and return.

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Full Submission Guidelines

• All submissions are done via Moksha. Any submissions received via email will be deleted without response.
• Additional guidelines for each specific submission category are available below.
• For fiction and nonfiction, please format your submission document as follows:
  • double-spaced
  • 12pt Times New Roman font
  • indented paragraphs
  • no extra space after paragraphs
• A cover letter is not required. However, we appreciate a brief paragraph telling us a little bit about yourself like where you’re from and why you love solarpunk. There is no need to include a third person bio. We will collect that and other needed info if your submission is accepted for publication.
• Responding to all submissions is important to us, and we do our best to respond in a timely manner. However, we receive a very large number of submissions. So if you have not received a response within 60 days of submitting, then please feel free to inquire by sending an email to the appropriate department address found at solarpunkmagazine.com/contact. 
• Simultaneous submissions are okay. Please let us know immediately if your submission gets accepted elsewhere before you hear from us.
• We only accept submissions of original, unpublished work. We do not accept unsolicited reprints.
  • Exceptions:
    • Visual Art: We do accept art reprints. Art is considered a reprint if it has been published anywhere online including but not limited to Patreon, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Art Station, Deviant Art, personal or artist websites, etc.
    • Translations: We accept translated works that have been previously published in languages other than English. If accepted, translated stories that have never appeared before in English will be paid $.08 per word.
• We do not accept submissions of work in languages other than English at this time, though we hope to in the future.
• We do not accept multiple submissions within a single category. However, you may enter one submission in each available category (fiction, poetry, art, and nonfiction) per open submission period. 
• If you are submitting work in more than one category (fiction, poetry, nonfiction or art), please use each of the separate submission portals for your submission in each category.
• We generally don’t provide feedback on submissions. We’d love to, but we get so many submissions that it’s just not possible.
• Please include the following with your submission:​​​
  • Attach your stories, articles, or poems in .doc, .docx. or .pdf format.Use .png or .jpeg attachments for visual art with a DPI of 300 or higher.We love to amplify voices from marginalized communities that are most impacted by climate change and other global problems. In fact, it’s one of the key characteristics of solarpunk. If you are part of such a community then we strongly encourage you not only to submit your work, but also to include one or more of the following tags with your submission as part of your cover letter:
    • #ownvoices#indigenous#globalsouth#bipoc#lgbtqia#actuallyautistic#neurodivergent#disabled#translation
    We realize there are many other tags that could be included, but we have to stop at some point or the list would be dozens of pages long. If you are unsure of which tag(s) you should use, feel free to inquire at info@solarpunkmagazine.com.
  • If we accept your work, we ask that you not publish it elsewhere or post it online prior to or within six months after publication in Solarpunk Magazine. For the rights we are asking for and other conditions, please see our publishing contract.
• We are a professional rate-paying market as defined by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Our current rates are:
  • 10 cents per word for fiction ($100 minimum)
  • $50 per poem
  • $100 for nonfiction
  • $100 for reprint cover art, $200 for original unpublished cover art
  • $50 for reprint interior art, $100 for original unpublished interior art 
• Payments are made via PayPal. If you live in an area where PayPal is not available, then we will work with you to make other arrangements.

• We strive to ensure that our magazine and website is a space where everyone in our reading and broader communities feels welcome and safe. In that spirit, we strictly enforce the following content guidelines:
  • We also do not accept work that:
    • is discriminatory or derogatory against communities that are and have historically been marginalized
    • disparages sex workers, or that glorifies or sexualizes violence against them
    • glorifies or sexualizes violence against people of marginalized communities
    • reduces people from marginalized communities to objects or otherwise dehumanizes them.
    • glorifies or sexualizes violence against children
    • contains graphic abuse of animals
    • We understand that stories and art may include elements of these things in the service of critiquing present-day society. But there is what we believe to be a clear difference between these elements being present in a work and work glorifying or advocating for these things.
  • Solarpunk Magazine reserves the right to place content warning notices on any work that we accept for publishing if we feel it is warranted in order to ensure our magazine is a welcoming and safe space for all our readers. We will work with artists and authors as needed to determine the appropriate and correct content warnings, if any. If you are not okay with this, then we respect that and encourage you to submit work that won’t require content warnings.
• If your submission is accepted, a copy of our publishing contract will be emailed to you to read, sign, and return.

Fiction

Our fiction editors are interested in works that stir readers with themes of defiance, change, and achievement. This effect isn’t likely to come via high concept utopias alone, but rather, from vibrant characters whose struggles affect the reader. Speculative elements should be apparent but not dominating, our disbelief suspended not by necessity, but by immersion. Any genre of science fiction, interstitial fiction, magic realism, or fantasy has potential as a solarpunk forum—we welcome robots and elves with equal excitement. 

Basics:
1500-7500 words
Please use standard manuscript formatting (12 pt Times New Roman or similar font, double spacing, 1″ margins, page number at the top of each page, indented paragraphs, no extra space between paragraphs).

Poetry

Send up to 5 poems or 5 pages of poems, whichever is shorter. Prose poetry is fine, but if you are in doubt, submit it as fiction.

If possible, please remove all identifying information (your name, email address, etc.) from your submission file. Your submission won’t be rejected if your manuscript is not anonymous but we prefer to form our initial impressions on the work alone.

What our poetry editor Tonya R. Moore Likes:

I welcome all genres and styles of poetry. The aspects of a poem that matter to me are rhythm, flow, and impact. I’m looking for vivid imagery and the stark honesty of heartfelt poems. Whether a submission makes me feel touched, inspired, or uplifted. Whether it fills me with yearning, hope, or poignance. I’m looking for optimistic and adventurous poems that will make readers yearn for a better future and instill a desire in us to create a more sustainable culture and a beautiful, healthy planet. These would ideally be poems that envision alternate histories and eco-friendly futures. Poems that demand Utopia.

Please follow the standards of any established poetic form that you choose to embrace. Free verse or abstract poetry is welcome and encouraged, but if you, for example, claim that your submission is a sonnet, it should adhere to the rules of iambic pentameter.

Here are some examples of poems that I consider my all-time favorites: 

The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats
Litany by George Campbell
The Deathing Room by Beatrice Winnifred Iker
Expect Nothing by Alice Walker
Enigmas by Pablo Neruda

Nonfiction

For non-fiction submissions, we’re interested in reviews, interviews, reports, articles, essays, and general audience-aimed overviews of academic papers relevant to solarpunk. Tell us about some cool science or technology that’s going to help us rewild the world, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or clean up our agricultural act. Weave us the stories of real people who are up to amazing things or of real projects that are underway to help create the world we want to live in. Give us a critical review (of a work, a set of works, or a topic) that rises high enough for a view of the forest as well as the trees. Stake an interesting claim and then convince us that you’re onto something. The possibilities are broad. Interesting is important. Thought-provoking is encouraged. So is keeping it kind. And, again, relevance to solarpunk is key.

Some basics:

1- Please don’t send us your solarpunk manifesto or ‘What is Solarpunk’ article. We aren’t interested in publishing those at this time.

2- Non-fiction submissions should be 1000-2000 words long, clearly written, and accessible to general readers. Jargon, when it is necessary at all, should be clearly defined in the text or in footnotes. 

3- We prefer to read things in standard manuscript format (double spacing, 1″ margins, page number at the top of each page). Footnotes should be used sparingly, endnotes not at all. Hyperlinks are great and a handful of references for further reading are fine, but not necessary. These are not meant to be academic publications! 

4- Any accompanying photos, figures, or other graphics should be the digital equivalent of camera-ready and when the manuscript author does not own the rights to the image, it is the author’s responsibility to secure permission for the publication of the image(s), with any costs to be borne by the author. 

5- Submissions should be in English, but either British, Canadian, or American spellings are okay, so long as the manuscript sticks to one style or the other. 

Please note that our unlike our other departments, nonfiction is currently always open for submissions.

Thanks and good luck!

Art

We accept art submissions for both cover art and interior magazine art. We are only interested in art that qualifies as solarpunk. If you think your work qualifies, but are unsure, submit and we’ll review your work.

We are not accepting submissions of AI generated art.

To be considered for cover art, work must be portrait orientation, 8.5×11 inches or a larger equivalent, and at least 300 DPI. For interior art, we also want at least 300 DPI, but orientation and size are open.

We prefer work with color, but we do also accept B&W submissions. We’re particularly interested in solarpunk art that features living beings, both human and nonhuman, rather than just architecture and technology scenes.

To have your art considered by our art team, please use the Art Submissions Portal to submit a link to your solarpunk art portfolio. Your portfolio folder should indicate which works are reprints, and which are unpublished. 

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©2026 Solarpunk Magazine
a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization