Our next submissions period is November 11 – December 12, 2025, for our Fall 2025 writing contest, "Connective | Uncontainable."
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 our Fall 2025 Writing Contest, "Connective | Uncontainable," guest-judged by Hari Alluri.
These are times—again, ongoing—in which so many of us are forced into existences and lives that harm us. And borders, their inherent falsity is why they are such overpoliced things: the binary of belonging must be constantly reinforced. And here a river overflows its banks constantly: every evaporated drop exceeds the category of the body it was named within. Alive means filled with so many desires to become uncontainable: modes of connective relationships that reach across, above, beneath.
Maybe we are in need of initiations, intimacies, and intonations that exceed their own categories. Maybe also remembrances of pasts, presents, and futures that rebel, invoking transformative relations to earth, each other, and spirit.
This call especially invites work that connects against expectations, that refuses the regulation of your identities / subject positions / experiences / writing itself, that connects beneath the surface of social, cultural, interpersonal and beyond-human relationships, that ascends towards possibilities beyond this world. If you’re infuriated by this call for work, maybe your work is calling you to send it in.
About the Judge
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of three poetry collections and two chapbooks, co-editor of several anthologies, and project editor for recently authored and forthcoming collections. A former Writer-in-Residence at
The Capilano Review and one of the current mentors for the League of Canadian Poets P.K. Page Mentorship Program, siya is a recipient of the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry and the Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council, National Film Board, and Writers’ Union of Canada, among others. Recent collaborations include Aray YAAR Collective, Burnaby Art Gallery, Centre A, The Digital Sala, Filipino Canadian Book Festival, Gulf Islands Poetry Festival, Indian Summer Festival, Vancouver Poetry House, Write, Create, Transform in Crete, and many more. Widely published in anthologies, journals, and online venues, his two most recent collections are The Flayed City (Kaya Press) and Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books).
Submission Guidelines
- Submission period: November 11 – December 12, 2025
- 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
- International entries are accepted
- The winner will receive a $500 cash prize and publication in an upcoming print issue of The Capilano Review
Submission Fees
$25 submission fee for all entries.
Submission fees include a complimentary one-year digital subscription to The Capilano Review.
The submission fee is waived for Indigenous entrants and those for whom the cost is a barrier. Please email contact@thecapilanoreview.com directly for alternate instructions to submit your work.