Autonomous Press is now accepting submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry for the 10th volume of Spoon Knife, our annual genre-bending lit anthology.

Please read this whole page carefully before submitting; some details have changed this time around!

Theme

The theme for Spoon Knife 10 will be Polarities.

Polarities: pairs of opposite forces or qualities or tendencies. Good and evil. Love and hate. Life and death. Heroism and villainy. Feminine and masculine. Night and day. Vice and virtue. Old and new. Order and chaos. The public persona and the hidden shadow self. The mundane everyday world and that which lies beyond.

What polarity lies at the heart of your story? In what ways does it manifest? What happens when the two sides of the polarity come into contact or conflict, or when one transforms into the other?

What We’re Looking For

One of the things that’s always set Spoon Knife apart from other anthology series is the wild diversity of genres represented in each volume. Each volume has its own theme, and we aim to show how that theme can be woven into stories across multiple disparate genres.

In a given volume of Spoon Knife, you might find the theme explored in tales of magical realism, science fiction, absurdist satire, swords-and-sorcery, historical romance, and horror, not to mention creative nonfiction and poetry. We especially love stories that defy established genre categories or creatively blend genres.

Ultimately, our criteria for assessing a submission boil down to this: is it a good, engaging, and well-written story that plays with the volume’s theme in an interesting way?

If you’re not familiar with Spoon Knife, please have a look at our most recent volume (that would be volume 8 at the moment, since 9 is still in press) to get a sense of what we’re after.

What We’re Not Looking For

We don’t accept simultaneous submissions, or work that’s already been published elsewhere.

We don’t accept fanfic; any fictional characters or settings featured in your work must be your own original creations.

Though we love well-written tales of social satire, we don’t accept preachy or transparently didactic work that beats the reader over the head with some simplistic political lesson which could have been summed up in a social media post.

Editors

Spoon Knife 10 will be co-edited by Nick Walker and Azzia Walker.

Timeline

The deadline for submissions is July 31st, 2025.

Contributors will be notified of acceptance or rejection in January 2026.

Spoon Knife 10 will be published in May 2026.

Submission Format

We only accept submissions in the form of Word documents (either .doc or .docx files).

All submissions must meet the following formatting criteria in order to be considered for publication:

1-inch margins all around.
No headers, footers, or page numbers.
No title page, just the title and your name at the beginning of the first page.
12-point Times New Roman font.
Line spacing set at 1.5 (not single-spaced or double-spaced).
Absolutely no underlining; use italics instead.
For em dashes, please use the em dash character (not a hyphen or pair of hyphens), with no space in between the em dash and the surrounding words.
Use serial commas (aka Oxford commas).
Thoroughly proofread and spell-check your submission before sending.

Non-poetry submissions must also follow these formatting guidelines:

First line of each paragraph indented this one doesn’t apply to poetry submissions.
No extra whitespace between paragraphs (i.e., only hit Return once after each paragraph)

Maximum length for submissions is 10k words. Exception: You can assume this limit to be as flexible as you need it to be if you’re an author whom we’ve published in a previous Spoon Knife volume or whose submission the editors have actively solicited.

Submission Process

Email all submissions to info@autpress.com. The subject line of your email should be your name plus the words “Spoon Knife 10 Submission.” Because we get a ridiculous amount of email, it’s important that you follow this email title format in order to prevent your submission from accidentally getting overlooked.

Due to limited space and the large number of submissions each volume receives, we’ll only accept one story per author.

If you’re submitting poetry, you may send up to three poems (please send all of them in a single email).

There’s no need to send an author bio with your submission. If your submission is accepted, we’ll be reaching out to you for a bio closer to the date of publication.

Our editorial process for accepted submissions includes a close copy-edit. We’ll check in with you if it looks like there needs to be any change to your piece beyond basic typo fixes. Please note that we do not send pre-print author proofs.

Payment and Rights

Payment for accepted submissions will be $30 plus 1 cent per word, sent near the time of the book’s release. You’ll also receive a free contributor copy of the book, with the option of purchasing additional copies at a deeply discounted wholesale rate.

You retain the rights to reprint your work elsewhere in the future, as long as you wait until at least six months after this volume of Spoon Knife is published.