Scribendi — Short Fiction

Overview
Scribendi is a national literary journal produced by students, with a longstanding commitment to publishing undergraduate writing of formal ambition and imaginative range. Its short fiction category operates on a blind-jury model: the work is read without attribution, and the editorial decision rests on the prose alone. The journal accepts any style of short fiction—short story, micro-fiction, flash fiction, tall tales—provided the work is titled and does not exceed 5,000 words. There is no submission fee. The category is deliberately narrow in quantity and broad in aesthetic: one (1) titled work per applicant. This constraint is not incidental. It asks the writer to make a curatorial judgment about their own strongest work rather than submitting a portfolio and letting the jury sort it out. The journal's format requirements—12-point Times New Roman, .doc, .docx, or .rtf—are equally specific, and they signal an editorial process that values legibility and standardization over presentation. The work must have been written while attending a university, or meet the eligibility criteria stated in the full guidelines. The blind-jury process is the central fact of this call. It means the jury will not know the writer's name, institutional affiliation, or publication history. What they will see is a single document: a title, a body of prose, and nothing else. For writers accustomed to the visibility economies of social media and workshop networks, this is a rare and clarifying condition. The submission is the entire argument.