submit

call for submissions

Submissions for our Spring 2024 edition are welcome until January 28, 2024. Send to staff@doublespeakmagazine.org.

DoubleSpeak features original translations of previously published poetry and prose, as well as original essays on translation. We consider submissions from everyone, whether connected to Penn or not. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, but we encourage you to submit early. If you’re past our January deadline, feel free to send work anyway for consideration in the following year.

While you might not think of yourself as a translator or a writer, everyone is connected to language, more deeply than we often realize. If you speak Swahili, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, Cantonese, or any other language, we want to hear from you. If you have studied one semester or ten years of a language, we want to hear from you. If you only speak English, we want to hear from you. If you've ever looked up a word in a translated poem you love, wondering how else it might be rendered, we want to hear from you. Send us work so we can love Sappho, Shu Ting, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Victor Hugo as much as you do.

We also publish brief personal essays, or musings, in each issue, and we encourage your prose reflections on how questions of translation surface in your life. Past issues include explorations of immigration, untranslatability, and identity which the multiplicity of language invites. We’d love to read about your experience of being multilingual in any sense, or about what it means to translate a life between languages and cultures.

Please reach out at staff@doublespeakmagazine.org with questions of any kind. If you aren’t sure how to begin, we’re happy to help you get started.

We also invite you to join our fantastic DoubleSpeak staff, which meets weekly on the Penn campus and can accommodate zoom. Please add your name to the listserv to receive the gift of the journal each year. You can also stay in touch with us on Facebook (@penndoublespeak) or on Instagram @doublespeak.mag

what to include in your submission:

We look forward to receiving your translations soon! Email us at staff@doublespeakmagazine.org.