The Capilano Review publishes innovative writing and art. Please get to know our magazine before submitting by reading some of our featured content or purchasing one of our most recent issues.
Before you submit your work, please note:
- Each issue of TCR includes art, poetry, fiction, essays and interviews commissioned by the editors, as well as a small selection of unsolicited poetry and prose from our annual writing contests and open reading periods.
- We publish 500-word reviews of books, exhibitions, and events in our online review section, See to see—, and welcome your pitches on an ongoing basis. Please email contact@thecapilanoreview.com with your brief pitch and 100-word bio, making sure to tell us why your piece will be a good fit for TCR.
- We accept simultaneous submissions but ask that you inform us if your work is placed elsewhere.
- We buy First North American serial rights and limited, non-exclusive digital rights. Copyright reverts to the author upon publication.
The Capilano Review is pleased to invite submissions to its Spring 2025 Writing Contest, guest-judged by Wayde Compton.
“Language, the vehicle of power, is a contaminated site.”
– Roy Miki
Authoritarian regimes always mask and mythologize their aggression with familiar and regressive genres: reminiscences of a fabricated golden age; exaggerated narratives of an ostensibly oppressed majority; the framing of targeted groups as literally evil. Demagogues make use of cliche, “plain speech,” and “normalcy” as much as they use the materiel of militarized force. When resisting authoritarianism, it can be tempting to answer simplification with simplification. But more compellingly, in his 1998 collection of essays Broken Entries, Roy Miki writes: “Truth does not reveal itself in the voice of clarity and plenitude” and that we “have to be vigilant not simply to mime the given narrative, genre, and filmic forms through which dominant values are aestheticized.” As Miki puts it, the answer is in seeking “a viable method for resisting assimilation, for exploring variations in form that undermine aesthetic norms, for challenging homogenizing political systems, and for articulating subjectivities that emerge from beleaguered communities — even at the risk of incomprehensibility, unreadability, indifference, or outright rejection.”
This is a call for work that celebrates the complex, the cross-genre, the formally mixed, the abject, the unstable, the code-switched (or the code-kept) resistant text. If your subject position, form, or style eschews easy categorization or reading, you are encouraged to submit your work.
The winner will receive a $500 cash prize and publication in an upcoming print issue of The Capilano Review. The winner will be announced in January 2025.
About the Judge
Wayde Comptonis the author of six books and the editor of two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories,The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. His work has been a finalist for three other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006 Compton co-founded Commodore Books, Western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press. He has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. Compton currently teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. His latest book isToward an Anti-Racist Poetics (U of Alberta P, 2024).
Submission Guidelines
- Submission period: June 3–30, 2024
- Work must be original and previously unpublished
- Submit up to 6 pages of poetry, prose, or other short experimental forms (PDF or Word formats only)
- All entries will be considered anonymously. Please do not include your name or other identifying fields on your manuscript pages
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere so that we can remove your entry from the contest
Submission Fees*
$25 for Canadian entries**
$35 for US/International entries
*Submission fee includes a complimentary one-year subscription to The Capilano Review.
**Note: Submission fee is waived for Indigenous entrants. Please email contact@thecapilanoreview.com directly for alternate instructions to submit your work.