Submissions for Spoon Knife 7 are closed as of June 30th, 2022.

As of July 1, 2022, we are accepting submissions for Spoon Knife 8. The Spoon Knife 8 Call for Submissions is here.

Authors who have submitted pieces to Spoon Knife 7 will be notified of acceptance or rejection by the end of 2022.

Spoon Knife 7 will be published in Spring 2023.

The theme for Spoon Knife 7 is transitions. All submissions should deal in some way or another with this theme, interpreted however you choose: transitions from one way of being to another, one stage of life to another, one perspective to another, one world to another…

Preference will be given to submissions that are in some way flavored with queerness and/or neuroqueerness. These elements need not be central or explicit––we’ll consider submissions in which queerness and/or neuroqueerness are explicit themes; we’ll just as happily consider submissions in which queerness or neuroqueerness don’t show up directly at all, but subtly inform the author’s voice or aesthetic.

All submissions must be sent as Word documents (.doc or .docx files). Prose submissions (fiction and memoir) must meet the following criteria:

• 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced.
• First line of each paragraph indented.
• No extra whitespace between paragraphs.
• Consistent use of Oxford commas.
• Thoroughly proofread and spell-checked.

If you’re submitting poetry, you may send up to 5 poems (please put them all in a single document). Poems should also be in 12-point Times New Roman font, but do not need to be double-spaced.

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 previously published or whose submission the editors have actively solicited.

Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check near the time of the book’s release.

Spoon Knife 7 will be co-edited by Nick Walker and Mike Jung.

NOS Magazine, the go-to magazine for neurodiversity culture and news, has released its annual list of the 50+ autistic people you should know, and we are happy to see that most of Autonomous Press’s partnership has made the list, including:

• Dani Alexis Ryskamp, our legal partner. They edited Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber, which is now available in ebook and will shortly be available in paperback too. Dani also contributed to The Spoon Knife Anthology last year, and they run Autistic Academic on the new Neurodiversity Matters blog network. Dani also writes as Verity Reynolds, and will be releasing their first novel Nantais under that name in late spring or early summer.
• Nick Walker, the coordinating editor for Autonomous Press and the blogger at Neurocosmopolitanism. Nick also co-writes the Weird Luck webcomic, and his work has been featured in both Spoon Knife volumes.
• The Teselecta Multiverse, of which N.I. Nicholson, the coordinating editor of neuroqueer books, is a member. He edited The Spoon Knife Anthology, and the whole Multiverse blog at Neurodiversity Matters, where the literary journal Barking Sycamores has also found its home. N.I. Nicholson founded Barking Sycamores with his partner.
• The Puzzlebox Collective, of which Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon is a member and spokesperson. Athena was AutPress’s production coordinator for almost two years before the board voted to make her Chief Operating Officer in February. Athena has published 5 books under the name Michael Scott Monje, Jr., including The US Book, which was co-written by the rest of the collective. She also wrote the Lambda Literary finalist Defiant.

AutPress Authors from Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber

On the NOS Magazine list, you will also find several AutPress authors, including Sparrow Rose Jones, the author of The ABCs of Autism Acceptance.  Sparrow also contributed to Spoon Knife 2, and so did the following members of the list:

• The Teselecta Multiverse’s N.I. Nicholson
• Every member of the Puzzlebox Collective: Athena Lynn writing as Michael Scott Monje Jr., Athena the Architect, Lynn Vargas, Monday Dillon, and Clay Dillon
• Dani Alexis Ryskamp, writing as Dani and as Verity Reynolds
• Amy Sequenzia, who also edited Typed Words Loud Voices
• Nick Walker
• Alyssa Hillary

Collectively, these writers are responsible for more than half the word count of the book, so if you discovered them through the article about autistics you should know, this book gives you a one-shot chance to get a taste for all their writing styles, and since many of them have also authored or edited full books on their own, this volume is a great introduction to a highly influential body of work by a cadre of autistic writers who have worked together for half a decade to develop the conversation around neurodiversity and representation in the media.

AutPress Authors Who Did Not Appear in Spoon Knife 2

Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu also made the list, and we would be remiss if we did not mention her good works in the activist community as well as her contribution to The Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children. She blogs at Who Needs “Normalcy” Anyway, and we hope to see more work from her at the press in the near future.

Congratulations to All Our Autonomous Press Authors

We want to give a warm and hearty congratulations to all of our Press authors, both those who made this list and those who did not, for helping to contribute to the development of our company. The partners and authors who did make this list might have been on it without these accomplishments and contributions, but there would most definitely have been fewer of them. We owe it to everyone who helped build this company that so many of our partners and writers made the list, and we also owe it to our readers to remind them that while we have strong autistic representation, we are not an all-autistic press. Spoon Knife 2 and its predecessor also feature a wide range of allistic neurodivergent voices, to help make sure the conversation is as inclusive as possible.

Call for Submissions

Autonomous Press is seeking submissions of short fiction, poetry, and short memoir for our upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 3: Incursions.

Spoon Knife 3: Incursions will be published in Spring 2018. It will be the third volume of our annual literary anthology, following The Spoon Knife Anthology: Tales of Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance (Spring 2016) and Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber (Spring 2017).

The Spoon Knife anthology series is published under Autonomous Press’ NeuroQueer Books imprint. All submissions should in some way touch upon or be relevant to the themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and/or the intersections of neurodivergence and queerness. These themes can be engaged with either directly or through metaphor.

For Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, we’re looking for pieces that focus on the theme of incursions by one reality into another.

Authors are encouraged to interpret this theme broadly and creatively. An incursion from another reality could mean a great many things, including but definitely not limited to:

•  Experiences such as hearing voices, hallucinations, visions, or so-called “psychotic breaks.”

•  Possession or visitation by spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, gods, or other otherworldly presences.

•  People or things (like artifacts or creatures) showing up from another world in the literal sense – from alternate universes, for instance.

•  People or things showing up from another world in the more figurative sense – for instance, the impact a visitor from a foreign culture has on a relatively homogeneous community, or the impact a forbidden book has on a sheltered mind.

And these are just a few examples of the vast array of possible interpretations.

The Editors

Every volume of Spoon Knife has a different team of co-editors. The editors for Spoon Knife 3: Incursions are Nick Walker and Andrew M. Reichart.

Nick Walker is an autistic genderqueer author, educator, and aikido teacher, and one of the founding editors of Autonomous Press. He is a faculty member at California Institute of Integral Studies and Sofia University, and senior instructor of the Aikido Shusekai dojo in Berkeley, California.

Andrew M. Reichart writes books, stories, and comics that blur the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. New editions of his books are forthcoming from Autonomous Press, starting in 2017. He lives in California with his wife and a couple of dogs.

Format and Length

Fiction and memoir pieces must meet the following criteria:

•  12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced.

•  Indent the first line of each paragraph, and do not put blank lines between paragraphs.

•  Make the first page a cover page with title and author contact info.

•  Author’s name and page number in the top right corner of every page

•  Use Oxford commas.

•  The entire manuscript should be thoroughly and carefully spell-checked and proofread (we recommend it be reviewed multiple times, by the author and by at least two other readers who have a sharp critical eye for detail, punctuation, grammar, and clarity of writing).

We will not accept manuscripts that do not meet all of these criteria, or that contain multiple spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation errors.

Fiction and memoir pieces should be 10,000 words or less. If you’re an author whom we’ve previously published or whose submission the editors have specifically solicited, and you need more than 10,000 words to tell your story properly, we may be able to make an exception about the word limit for you – please contact the editors about it.

If you’re submitting poetry, you may submit up to 5 poems of any length and style, provided all the poems are consistent with the theme of the anthology. Poems should also have the author’s name in the header of each page, as well as a cover page with author contact info. Poetry does not need to be double-spaced.

All submissions must be in .doc or .docx format, or in a fully Word-compatible file format like .odt or .rtf.

When and How to Submit

We are accepting submissions now. All submissions are due by Saturday, September 30, 2017.

Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection no later than November 1, 2017.

Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check during the first quarter of 2018.

Email all submissions to nick@autpress.com.

The title of your email must be either “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Fiction,” “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Memoir,” or “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Poetry.” Using one of these three email titles ensures that your submission will end up in the right place.

Please include a cover letter that makes it clear exactly what name you wish to be credited under, and that gives a 3-4 sentence bio written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.