Submissions for the 2027 edition of The Mockingbird open from August 24-October 14, 2026.
The Mockingbird is East Tennessee State University's award-winning literary publication. All currently enrolled ETSU students are eligible to submit to The Mockingbird, regardless of major.
Students may enter previously unpublished works in multiple genres, but no more than the number permitted per genre. The Mockingbird practices blind submissions. There is no submission fee.
- Poetry: Students may submit up to five poems per submission period.
- Fiction: Students may submit up to two pieces of fiction per submission period, not exceeding 5,000 words. These may be short stories or self-contained excerpts.
- Nonfiction: Students may submit up to two pieces of nonfiction per submission period, not exceeding 5,000 words. These may be short essays or self-contained excerpts.
- Drama: Students may submit up to two pieces of drama, not exceeding 5,000 words, including stage directions and related content.
Authors must title their own works (we will not accept untitled entries). While we respect an author's choice to publish under a pen name, we must have official ETSU identification to publish a person's work.
The Mockingbird is committed to publishing original human-generated writing and art and will not consider work produced in whole or in part by Generative AI or a large language model, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
Email submissions to mockingbird@etsu.edu.
To protect blind submissions, do not include your name in the submitted file. In the body of the email, include name, E number, Title, Genre. Attach the submission in .doc, .docx, .odt or .rtf format. Each work should have its own file. Attachments should include ONLY your E number and the title of work at the top of each page of the submission. (See template for an example.) We will not consider submissions that do not follow these guidelines.
If a simultaneously submitted work is accepted for publication elsewhere, authors should email mockingbird@etsu.edu to withdraw it from consideration
Residual Rights: The Mockingbird reserves the following rights pertaining to publishing material:
- Aside from print publication, The Mockingbird reserves the rights to publish representational segments of all written work on our website or on our Facebook page.
- The Mockingbird reserves the rights to republish material in future anthologies, collections, or solicitations.
- The Mockingbird returns other publishing rights to the creators with the request that subsequent publications credit The Mockingbird as the first publisher of the material.