Most writers looking for somewhere to submit start with the national magazines, get nowhere, and conclude the ladder has no bottom rung. There are two rungs published inside thirty miles of Clearwater, and almost nobody local seems to know about either.
Local writers skipping these two are leaving a lot on the table. People spend a year firing stories at the magazines everybody has heard of while two journals with real standards sit half an hour away, asking for exactly the Florida material they already have. I’d point every writer in this county at these before they burn another year on long-shot rejections.
Saw Palm
The creative writing MFA program at the University of South Florida in Tampa produces Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art.
It was established in 2006 as a web journal by Professor John Henry Fleming and the program’s graduate students, and began publishing in print and taking subscriptions in 2008. Its twentieth anniversary issue came out in 2026.
The premise is the reason to care. The journal exists to go past the version of Florida found in tourist brochures and capture the actual experience of Florida lives and landscapes, through writers and artists both in the state and outside it.
It publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, art, photography, reviews and interviews. Fiction runs to a maximum of four thousand words.
The submission window for the annual print issue is July 1 to October 1. Reviews, interviews and the Places to Stand series are read year-round.
Work must connect to Florida in some way, through images, people or themes. Writers anywhere in the world can submit provided that connection holds, and Floridians can submit work that’s not obviously about somewhere else.
Previously published work isn’t accepted, online or in print. Past issues are downloadable as free PDFs. That means you can read the thing properly before submitting, and you should. Free back issues are a gift, and I wish more writers used them. Plenty of submissions go out to journals the sender has never opened, and editors can tell within a paragraph. Twenty minutes with a past issue of Saw Palm will tell you more about what they want than any guideline page.
Why the bottom rung matters
Most writers looking for somewhere to submit aim at the magazines everybody has heard of, collect rejections for a year, and conclude the whole system is closed.
What’s happening is a mismatch of scale. The famous magazines receive thousands of submissions for a handful of slots, largely from writers who already have books, and the odds are what they’re regardless of how good the piece is. Regional and university journals work on a different scale entirely. Fewer submissions, a stated remit that narrows the field further, and editors who are looking for work that fits instead of filtering an avalanche.
The credit you earn is real either way. A publication credit changes how the next submission reads, and it changes how a query letter reads, because it shows that a stranger with editorial judgment chose your work over other people’s. That’s the cheapest credibility available to a writer without a book.
And the remit cuts in your favor here. If you live in this state, Florida material is what you have by default. A story set on this coast competes badly at a magazine in Iowa and competes well at one whose entire purpose is this place.
Why Saw Palm is worth your time
Because student-run doesn’t mean small-time here, and the alumni list proves it.
Former editors include Alicia Thompson, now a USA Today bestselling novelist, who was in the author lineup at the romance lit fest Largo Public Library hosted in May 2026. Also Jaquira Díaz, who won a Whiting Award. Gloria Muñoz, a former poet laureate. And Alysia Sawchyn, who went on to edit The Rumpus.
Published contributors have included Denise Duhamel and Connie May Fowler alongside emerging writers, many of whom appeared in print there first.
The other thing worth knowing is that the editors make a point of responding personally, if briefly, to every submission. Anybody who has collected form rejections for a year understands what that’s worth. That detail alone would convince me. Form rejections grind writers down in a way nobody talks about enough, and a team of busy graduate students choosing to write back to everybody tells me the people running this journal respect the people who send it work.
There’s also Places to Stand, a Google Earth map of the state pinned with short essays about specific Florida environments, natural and built. For a writer trying to work out how to write about a place instead of merely setting a story in one, it’s a useful thing to read through.
Places to Stand
One Saw Palm project deserves separate attention because of what it teaches, independent of whether you ever submit.
Places to Stand is a Google Earth map of Florida pinned with short essays, each attached to a specific location, natural or built. The result is a literary map of the state assembled one place at a time.
Read a few and the discipline becomes obvious. Each piece has to justify its pin. That means it can’t be about Florida in general. It has to be about that spot, and about what being in that spot is like. That forces the specificity that everything else in this piece is arguing for.
Current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit to the series, and it’s read year-round alongside reviews and interviews. That makes it a lower-pressure entry point than the annual print issue.
For anybody working out how to write about a place instead of merely setting a story in one, it’s the clearest available demonstration and it costs nothing to read.
Tampa Review
The University of Tampa publishes Tampa Review, and it’s the older of the two by four decades.
It was founded in 1964 as the Tampa Poetry Review and took its current name in 1988. It appears twice a year and Richard Mathews has edited it. It’s indexed and carried on Project MUSE. That places it squarely in the academic literary world instead of the regional one. Sixty-odd years of publishing out of a university in this city is something I think Tampa should be far prouder of. Literary journals fold all the time when budgets tighten, and one that’s lasted since 1964 deserves more local readers than it probably gets.
The University of Tampa has also run a low-residency MFA in creative writing, structured as a two-year, four-term course for poets, fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers, built around ten-day residencies and mentor work in between. Check the university directly for its current status before making plans around it, because low-residency programs change more often than their catalogue pages do.
Why submit to a local literary magazine?
Three reasons, and none of them is that it’s easier.
The first is fit. A Florida-themed journal wants Florida material, and if you live here you have it by default. A story set on this coast competes badly at a magazine in Iowa and competes well at one whose entire remit is this state.
The second is that publication credits compound. One appearance in a print journal changes how the next submission reads, and it changes how a query letter reads. It’s the cheapest credibility available to a writer with no book yet. The third is proximity. These are institutions you can attend readings at, whose editors appear at events in the rooms this series has been documenting. Mojo Books and Records is a few minutes from the USF campus. Oxford Exchange sits near the University of Tampa. Literary communities are physical before they’re anything else.
What a student-run journal is really like
Saw Palm is managed and edited by students in USF’s creative writing MFA program, and the arrangement gets misread in both directions.
It’s not a class exercise. Student editors solicit submissions, evaluate them, and select what runs. That’s the same work an editor does anywhere. The journal describes itself as both a literary publication with global reach and a hands-on learning laboratory, and the second part is why the first part functions.
What it means for a submitter is that your work is read by people who are themselves writing seriously and are early enough in their careers to be excited by a good piece. They haven’t yet developed the reflexive weariness of somebody who has read submissions for fifteen years.
It also means the editorial team turns over. The taste of the journal shifts year to year, which is an argument for reading the most recent issue instead of one from five years ago, and an argument for submitting again after a rejection.
The evidence that it works is the alumni list. When a journal’s former editors include a USA Today bestseller, a Whiting Award winner, a poet laureate and a future editor of The Rumpus, the standard applied to your submission isn’t a student standard.
Writing about Florida without writing a postcard
Saw Palm’s stated mission is to get past the version of Florida found in tourist brochures, and that’s a harder brief than it sounds.
The state comes pre-loaded with imagery that does most writers’ work for them. Palms, humidity, retirees, alligators, weirdness, the punchline version of Florida Man. All of it is true and all of it is exhausted, and a piece built on it reads as though it were assembled from a stock photo library. The alligator-and-retiree version of this state is lazy, and it treats the lives of the people who live here as a punchline. A journal built to push back against that is doing work I care about.
What the journal is asking for instead is the specific. A particular street in a particular decade. A trade that existed here and doesn’t now. The way a family really talks. Weather as a plain fact of a day.
That’s also the difference between a manuscript that gets taken and one that doesn’t, in any market. The general is available to everybody. The specific is only available to the person who was there.
Places to Stand, a Saw Palm project mapping short essays onto specific Florida locations, is the clearest illustration of what they mean, and it costs nothing to read through before you write anything.
How do you submit to a literary magazine?
Read the magazine first. Past issues of Saw Palm are free, so there’s no excuse, and the commonest reason for rejection at any journal is work that could have been sent anywhere.
Follow the guidelines exactly. Word limits, file formats, simultaneous submission policies. Editors reading hundreds of pieces use guideline compliance as a first filter and they’re right to.
Let the work explain itself. A cover note is two or three sentences.
Send unpublished material only. That includes anything you posted on your own blog or newsletter. And expect to wait. Annual journals read on annual timescales, and a reading period that closes in October is producing an issue for the following spring.
What happens after you submit to a literary magazine?
Nobody prepares you for the waiting, and understanding the mechanics makes it considerably less maddening. An annual journal reads on an annual timescale. Saw Palm’s window closes on October 1 and produces an issue for the following spring. That means the gap between sending and knowing can run into months. That’s not the journal being slow. That’s what producing a print issue with a volunteer editorial team looks like.
Saw Palm’s editors make a point of responding personally, if briefly, to every submission. That’s rare enough to say twice. Anybody who has collected identical form rejections for a year knows exactly what that’s worth.
A personal rejection with a sentence of reaction in it’s information, and it contains the one observation that unlocks the piece.
If a piece is declined, send it somewhere else and send something different back to the same journal. Editorial teams at student-run publications turn over. That means the taste shifts year to year, and a piece that missed one year can land the next with no changes at all.
And don’t query about status unless the stated response time has clearly passed. Everybody reading your submission is doing it alongside a degree or a job.
Beyond these two
Two journals inside thirty miles is the local picture, and the state picture is larger. Saw Palm maintains a page of Florida literary links covering journals published elsewhere in the state. That’s the most useful single starting point I know of for anybody working outward from here. Among them are publications run out of county libraries, university presses and independent presses in other Florida cities.
The point of working outward in that order is fit again. A Florida journal in another city still wants Florida material, still receives fewer submissions than a national magazine, and still produces a credit that means something. Beyond the journals, the events calendar matters as much as the submission calendar. I’ve written about the book festivals in this region and about finding a writing group worth sitting in, and between them they cover the rest of the literary infrastructure here.
Editors and writers turn up at these things. A journal is a submission address, and it’s also a group of people who go to readings within a half-hour drive of you.
What this is for
Nobody makes a living from literary magazines. That’s not the point and never was.
What they do is give a serious reader, who’s not your friend and owes you nothing, a reason to study your work and decide. That verdict is worth more than a dozen encouraging comments, and it’s available twice a year within a half-hour drive.
If you live here and write, ignoring these two throws away a real advantage. Send something to Saw Palm while the window’s open between July and October, and let a stranger with standards tell you where you stand. I think that verdict will do more for a developing writer than another year of hoping a famous magazine notices.
For the room to write the piece in, Tampa and St. Petersburg are covered separately, and the writing group piece covers where to get it read before you send it.
