Literary Journal

Plant-Human Quarterly

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About the magazine

Plant-Human Quarterly is a literary and arts publication, affiliated with the Otherwise Collective, dedicated to exploring the entanglements between plant life and human experience. Founded on the premise that flora is not mere backdrop but active participant in cultural and personal narratives, the journal publishes poetry, prose, and visual art that attend to botanical presence with critical and lyrical rigor. Its ethos is one of slow attention: favoring work that observes, listens, and complicates the human-centered gaze rather than merely deploying plants as metaphor. Each issue is curated to foster a community of writers and artists who treat the vegetal world as a site of knowledge, kinship, and ethical inquiry.

Editorial focus

Plant-Human Quarterly explores the myriad ways writers manifest their relationship to the botanical world—from heavily researched pieces, to keen observation, to less systematic, intuitive ways of knowing and interacting—that attempt to communicate across boundaries and possibly approach a plant’s-eye-view of the world.

PoetryCreative Nonfiction

Submitting your work

Reading periodJan 1 to Dec 31

Reading feeNo

PaymentNo payment

Response timeLess than 3 months

Simultaneous submissionsYes

Unsolicited submissionsYes

Before submitting, read at least one full issue to understand the journal's tonal and thematic range—work that is patient, precise, and resistant to cliché. They welcome poetry, short prose, and visual art that foregrounds plant-human relations, but avoid pieces that use flora merely as decorative symbol. Simultaneous submissions are typically accepted, but notify immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. Include a brief cover letter stating your connection to the journal's focus; no need for extensive publication lists. Response times vary, so query after three months if you haven't heard back. They value work that demonstrates genuine observation and ecological literacy over trend-driven submissions.

We look for poems and prose in which the plant-human dynamic is central to the narrative (or dramatic subtext) rather than peripheral, and we favor work in which humans attempt to approach the world of plants rather than use plants as metaphors for human experience or bit-players in a human drama.

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