RUBY is a literary magazine that publishes short-form food narratives that strive for voice and artistry. We want work that grabs us and doesn't let us go—fierce prose we wish we had written. Send us your literary, genre-nonconforming, experimental, hybrid, surprising, tender, joy-filled, or painful words. Food narratives are vulnerable narratives, stories of belonging, identity, justice, disparities, and community. Food is biography. It is complex, imbued with harm and healing, trauma and love. Our experiences with food almost immediately become storied into narrative.
RUBY is a bi-annual literary magazine and press that publishes short-form food narratives that strive for voice and artistry. We want work that grabs us and doesn't let us go—fierce prose we wish we had written. Send us your literary, genre-nonconforming, experimental, hybrid, surprising, tender, joy-filled, or painful words. Food narratives are vulnerable narratives, stories of belonging, identity, justice, disparities, and community. Food is biography. It is complex, imbued with harm and healing, trauma and love. Our experiences with food almost immediately become storied into narrative.
RUBY opens for submission twice annually for its fall/winter and spring/summer issues and reviews submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid prose up to 1,000 words. We do not consider unsolicited, previously published work.
RUBY will accept submissions for its 2024 fall/winter issue from June 1, 2024 to September 1, 2024.
Your previously unpublished submissions should appear in English.
Translations are welcome and should be accompanied by a copy of the original, previously unpublished text along with a statement certifying permission to publish from the translation rights holder.
Submissions are free.
We look forward to reading your work and thank you for sharing it with us
Ruby reads submissions for its literary magazine twice during the year.
RUBY will accept submissions for its 2024 fall/winter issue from June 1, 2024 to September 1, 2024.
Ruby welcomes flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction as well as experimental, fluid, and hybrid forms of the genres of any length up to 1,000 words that challenge and reinvent the genres' conventions that include food in some way. Please note that unless solicited, we no longer publish work longer than 1,000 words.
Like language, food is interpretable and symbolic; it serves to make meaning as narrative. When we describe what we eat—how we prepare and experience it, where we obtain it, how we nourish ourselves and others, the spaces in which we eat, and how we share food—or don't—we reveal who we and our characters are.
Please select your genre: Fiction, CNF, or Hybrid:
- 1,000-word count maximum and up to three short-form narratives may be submitted in a single document.
- Previously unpublished submissions are open to all writers and International submissions are welcome.
- Please submit work in English only.
- RUBY welcomes previously unpublished translations. Please include permission from the translation holder.
- RUBY permits simultaneous submissions and asks that you notify us immediately if your submission is accepted elsewhere for publication.
- If you withdraw your work, please consider submitting another.
- Please submit to one genre per reading period.
- If we decline your work, we ask that you wait until the next reading period to submit again.
- Submissions are free.
- Contact us at rubyliterarypress@gmail.com with inquiries.