Starting today and ending June 15, I will be reading and considering submissions of creative nonfiction to expand the Nobody’s Home anthology. All submitting writers should read the guidelines thoroughly, then send a query and wait for a response about whether to send the work. I am particularly interested in works about or set in the states of Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas, as they are currently underrepresented in the anthology. Works accepted during this time will be published in August 2024.

This year’s Open Submissions Period is the sixth for Nobody’s Home. In the project’s inaugural year, the first three Open Submissions Periods were held in the latter half of 2020 and the first half of 2021. Subsequently, in 2022 and 2023, unsolicited submissions were read in the spring, with accepted works published each summer. Invitation-only submissions periods have been held in the fall of those two recent years.

Submissions of reviews and interviews will continue to be accepted during this time. Again, anyone considering a submission should read the guidelines thoroughly before sending a query.

Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The project, which was created in 2020, collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Today, Nobody’s Home features more than fifty essays and offers secondary-education lesson plans for English and Social Studies classrooms, suggestions for documentaries, and reviews of books, as well as Groundwork, my editor’s blog.