CRAFT 2023 Fall Editorial Feedback Event

CRAFT 2023 Fall
Editorial Feedback Event
September 1 – 29, 2023

This event is now closed!
Thanks to all who shared their work!

We know life is busy, but we hope you had the chance to write this summer—whether at a faraway conference or retreat, or even in your own backyard. If so, you might be ready to share new (or newly revised) work with an experienced editor. We warmly invite you to submit your writing to the CRAFT 2023 Fall Editorial Feedback Event!

Why request feedback? Maybe you’re stuck on a scene, or can’t quite find a home for a particular story or essay. New eyes on your work can make all the difference in your revision process. As we all know, writing successful prose is a lifelong endeavor that takes time, perseverance, and patience. As writers, we can continue to thrive through a strong sense of community by sharing our work with others eager to give feedback.

CRAFT offers editorial feedback on creative prose up to 6,000 words. We’ve carefully chosen a team of qualified editors to provide thoughtful critique. For each piece sent, you’ll receive line-level marginal notes, as well as a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. While editorial feedback is inherently subjective, our suggestions will always be actionable and encouraging. Please allow up to twelve weeks to receive your feedback materials.

For your convenience and savings, we offer two options—single letters and triple letter packages. Rates are detailed below. Triple letter packages offer an 8% discount.

All work sent through this event will also be considered for publication in CRAFT. Should we accept your work, no feedback will be offered and the fee will be refunded.

If you have questions about submissions, please send an email to: contact (at) craftliterary (dot) com.

Testimonials from Previous Recipients of CRAFT Editorial Feedback:

Wow! I’m absolutely floored by the feedback experience at CRAFT. My editor was Katelyn [Keating], and she did a stellar job. I received incredibly thorough feedback, and have a much better idea, now, about how to move forward in strengthening and revising my essay, which is one of the most emotionally difficult pieces I’ve ever written. This piece is really important to me, and I’m moving forward with confidence and vision, thanks to Katelyn and CRAFT. I couldn’t recommend your services more highly. Thank you, Katelyn! —Kelli S. B.

I thank my editor, Joanna Acevedo, for reviewing my work and providing valuable feedback. I greatly appreciate her insights, kind words of encouragement, support, and recommendations. She took the time to understand and engage with my character, showing commitment and dedication to her work as an editor. Thank you for believing in my character! —Teodora G.

Thank you so much [to Val Mathews] for your revelatory comments! Reading them was an amazing experience. It was so incredible to have someone speak from inside my own interiority. I just finished reading your feedback…and it was amazing to see how your comments expanded and deepened my story. I have never figured out how to approach revising. I think I thought of it like the game Jenga, but that adding as well as pulling parts out could make the whole thing fall apart. You showed me a way to do it that is so specific to this story. I learned so much! —Amy C.

Rates:

Flash fiction / flash creative nonfiction up to 1,000 words (one flash piece or up to three micro* pieces totaling fewer than 1,000 words): $59 for one letter OR $149 for three letters
Short story / creative nonfiction essay from 1,000 to 3,500 words (one piece): $79 for one letter OR $199 for three letters
Short story / creative nonfiction essay from 3,500 to 6,000 words (one piece): $99 for one letter OR $249 for three letters

*For our purposes, micros should be about 333 words maximum apiece, please. Include all three micros in ONE document.

How you can help us when sending work for our review:

Please send only .doc or .docx files, so that we can use MS Word’s Track Changes for our marginal notes.
Kindly double-space and use Times New Roman 12.

Guidelines:

CRAFT Editorial Feedback is open to all prose writers.
Please send fiction or creative nonfiction only.
International submissions are welcome.
Please submit work primarily written in English, but conceptually or stylistically necessary codeswitching is warmly welcomed.
Please adhere to the 6,000 word count maximum.
If sending up to three micros, include all pieces in ONE document.
Work that has received editorial feedback is not eligible for submission to CRAFT contests.
We strongly discourage simultaneous submissions in conjunction with editorial feedback. If your piece is already under review by our team and you withdraw it, we will not be able to offer a refund. If you withdraw your piece before we have begun feedback, we will be happy to let you substitute another piece of equal length.
We do not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, disability, family status, gender identity or expression, national origin, race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, or for any other reason.
Additionally, we do not tolerate discrimination in the writing we consider for publication. Work we find discriminatory on any of the bases stated here will be declined without complete review.
Unless specifically requested, we do not accept, consider, or review AI-generated work.

Editorial Feedback Team:

JOANNA ACEVEDO (she/they) is the Pushcart-nominated author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). Her work has been seen across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, and The Masters Review. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021 and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income for Artists. Find her on Twitter at @jo_avocado.

YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA (she/her/hers) is a writer and editor living in South Florida. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work has appeared or is upcoming in Chapter House Journal, Typehouse, Slag Glass City, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a memoir. Find her on Twitter @Yaelwrites71.

MELISSA BENTON BARKER is the flash fiction section editor at CRAFT. A graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, her writing appears in Longleaf Review, Moon City Review, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Best Small Fictions 2021. She has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

ALYSE BURNSIDE is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Believer, and elsewhere. She’s working on a book.

KYLE COCHRUN (he/him) is a writer living in Seattle, Washington. He is a contributing writer for PopMatters, where he writes features, interviews, and album reviews. His essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Akron Anthology, Watershed Review, Echo, and CRAFT. He received an MFA in creative writing from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts graduate program.

DEIRDRE DANKLIN’s flash fiction chapbook, How to Start a Coven, is forthcoming from Variant Lit, and her novella, Catastrophe, is available now wherever books are sold. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and two cats.

ALEXA DORAN recently completed her PhD in poetry at Florida State University. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). She is also the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). Look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Pleiades, Witness, Salt Hill Journal, and Gigantic Sequins, among others.

BRANDON DUDLEY is the author of Hazards of Nature: Stories, selected by Sigrid Nunez as the winner of the 2020 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Contest. His writing, interviews, and criticism have appeared in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, North by Northeast 2, and others. He holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He lives in Maine with his wife and two sons. Find him on Twitter @brandondudley8.

ROSS FEELER’s fiction has appeared in Electric Literature‘s “Recommended Reading,” The Common, New South, Potomac Review, Story | Houston, Hypertext, and others. His novel-in-progress received the Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar and was a finalist for James Jones First Novel Award. He teaches English at Texas State University.

B. B. GARIN is a writer living in Buffalo, New York. Her echapbook, New Songs for Old Radios, is available from Wordrunner Press. Her work has appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Luna Station Quarterly, Palooka, 3rd Wednesday, Crack the Spine, and more. She is currently a prose reader and blog contributor for The Masters Review. She continues to improve her craft at GrubStreet Writing Center, where she has developed several short fiction pieces, as well as two novels. Connect with her online @bb_garin.

SUZANNE GROVE currently serves as both the associate editor and short fiction section editor for CRAFT. Her fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Barren Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, No Tokens, Okay Donkey, The Penn Review, Porter House Review, Raleigh Review, X-R-A-Y, No Contact, and elsewhere. She has also received honorable mention for her fiction appearing on Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress website.

COURTNEY HARLER (she/her) is a freelance writer, editor, and educator based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe (2017) and an MA in English (Literature) from Eastern Washington University (2013). Courtney is currently editor in chief of CRAFT and editorial director for Discover New Art, and has read and written for UNT’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize, The Masters Review, Funicular Magazine, Reflex Fiction, and Chicago Literati in recent years. She also hosts the literary podcast PWN’s Debut Review, as well as teaches and edits for Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing studio in New Jersey. For her creative work, Courtney has been honored by support from Key West Literary Seminar, Writing By Writers, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Nevada Arts Council. Courtney’s work has been published in multiple genres in literary magazines around the world. Find her on Instagram @CourtneyHarler.

KATELYN KEATING (she/her) was the editor in chief of CRAFT from 2018 to 2021 and now serves as editor at large. She was a 2017 fellow of the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop and has been on their faculty since 2018, overseeing PubLab, leading the magazine track as a program manager, and serving as the publisher coordinator for LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair. She is a production manager with Berrett-Koehler Publishers, and was the production and operations manager at Prospect Park Books until it left California in 2021. Her essays appear in Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, Lunch Ticket, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Katelyn has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, where she worked for two years on Lunch Ticket, serving as editor in chief for issues 11 and 12. Find her on Twitter @katelyn_keating.

VAL M. MATHEWS is a big-hearted, fun-loving editor who teaches courses in developmental editing for the University of California Berkeley Extension, Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and the Editorial Freelancers Association in New York City. Val also freelances on the side and works as an editorial consultant for CRAFT and The Masters Review. Previously, she was an editor for The Wild Rose Press, a small traditional publishing house in New York. She earned an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University and a BFA from the University of Georgia. Fun fact about Val: She’s been an FAA-certified flight instructor for over twenty-five years, and in the past, she flew Lear jets for a living.

GABRIEL MOSELEY is a writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in The Masters Review, Nordic Kultur, Stratus, and Alaska Airlines’ Alaska Beyond Magazine. He received an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and certificates in both editing and literary fiction from the University of Washington. He has been a finalist for the Made at Hugo House Writing Fellowship, LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the Haleakalā National Park Residency. He is a guest editor for The Masters Review.

JESSE MOTTE is an MFA candidate for fiction at the University of South Carolina. He is currently a reader for Witness, the cofiction editor at Yemassee Journal, and a fiction editor at word west. He’s been reading for literary magazines for four years and is currently an editorial assistant for fiction at CRAFT.

GAGE SAYLOR is the assistant director of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Passages North, Tampa Review, Crab Creek Review, Iron Horse, and elsewhere. He has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize at Nimrod and is a previous semifinalist for the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize at North American Review. He received his MFA at McNeese State University, where he was awarded the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction.

DAVID K. SLAY completed a two-year program of short fiction writing workshops in the University of California, Los Angeles, Writers’ Program. His short stories, flash fiction, and microfiction can be found in a group of diverse literary journals, including Calliope, Gold Man Review, ImageOutWrite, The Magnolia Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, American Writers Review, and others. Nonfiction craft articles are in CRAFT and Submittable’s “Content for Creatives.” He has been a submissions reader for CRAFT since 2019, and has served as a guest editor for Vestal Review. He lives in Seal Beach, California.