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 will accept submissions for its final issue to be published by the end 2025 from September 15, 2025, to October 15, 2025.
Your previously unpublished submissions should appear in English.
Translations are welcome and should be accompanied by a copy of the original, previously unpublished text along with a statement certifying permission to publish from the translation rights holder.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
Ruby reads submissions for its literary magazine twice during the year.
RUBY will accept submissions for its final issue to be published by the end of 2025 from September 15, 2025 to October 15, 2025.
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.
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 genre submission.
- 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 no more than three short-form narratives a single genre submission.
- Submissions are free.
- Contact us at rubyliterarypress@gmail.com with inquiries.