The B’K is a quarterly art and lit, online and printed magazine prioritizing traditionally marginalized creators, but open to all. Own voices only, please.
“We are interested in people being able to decolonize their own stories and tell their own stories.”
We have a set of guidelines of what we will or will not read or publish for the emotional well-being of our readers (internally and externally). Please review those guidelines (below) and only send us authentic, own voices pieces that follow them.
We are committed to editing with an equity lens, ensuring any edits are for clarity and not stylistic in nature. We are committed to never alter a writing style, the intention of a piece, or change the voice in any way. If we ever fail or come up short in this attempt, please do let us know.
We are limiting each issue to 44-pages and will notify accepted submitters as to which issue they’ve been accepted to. We are free to submit to and free to read. We will accept up to one written piece and two pieces of artwork per issue per person and typically respond within two weeks.
Because our issues do often deal with mature topics, our publication is open to creatives aged 16+ only.
To submit, fill out our submission form (one piece per entry in the form). Be sure to read all of our guidelines below before submitting.
Issues come out in January, April, July, and October. Submissions are due for that issue on the 15th of the previous month or when the issue is full, whichever happens first.
The Team
We’re the masthead, the team, the folks reviewing your work:
ChrisDana
Chris (they/them) is the primary editor. They are a trans nonbinary, queer, triracial artist and writer who has been writing mostly creative nonfiction (but occasionally delves into Sci Fi shorts or haikus and tankas) and creating educomics for nearly 20 years.
Dana (he/him) is the secondary editor if Chris is not sure about a piece. He is a hobbyist CGI artist and photographer, and the primary editor of Chris’s works.
The team will occasionally tap someone in the lit community to read a piece (without the creator’s name included) if there is a question regarding identity that Chris or Dana don’t have experience with within the piece.
We require written submissions to be under 2,000 words for prose or five pages for poetry, submitted in a Word Document or text file. PDFs will not be considered and will be rejected outright. Submissions must be in English as, unfortunately, that is the only language we can read. Do feel free to add words in a language other than English and we will consult Google or other resources, but the submission must be primarily in English.
We require that image submissions be sent at least 300 dpi and at least 3 inches by 3 inches (if you would like your piece to be considered for the cover, it must be sized at least 8.75 inches width and/or 11.25 inches height ). We do not accept AI-generated work as it doesn’t fit in our definition of own voices. By submitting your work, you confirm that the artwork is yours and yours alone, does not make use of images that are not your own (or if you do use images that are not your own, they are royalty-free and do not constitute the bulk of the submission), and was not AI-generated.
We require that you properly gender our editor. Any submission that misgenders will be responded to unread. If you wish to address the editor, you can do so as editor, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The B’K, or Chris. If you wish to speak about our editor, they use the pronouns they/them.
We will accept simultaneous submission. Please let us know if it is a simultaneous submission (in the “Anything you want our editors to know about your piece” section of the form) and let us know as soon as you do if it has been accepted elsewhere.
Our form requires the following information: your name as you’d like it to appear, the name of the piece as you’d like it to appear, trigger warnings if necessary, and answers to our identity questions.
We aim to have a diverse publication from a diverse set of voices. In order to make sure we do that, we need to know who you are. We will not deny someone based on identity unless it is deemed that the submission becomes inappropriate or appropriation due to the submitter’s identity. Things that we would consider inappropriate or appropriation would include writing about what it’s like to be part of a historically marginalized community you do not belong to. We encourage people outside of the community to include people from historically marginalized communities, but we won’t publish pieces that explain what it’s like to be part of those communities. We value inclusivity and believe the only way to do it right is with #OwnVoices.
We don’t want to read something that might be triggering without being in the right head space. We would hate to deny something because it caught us off guard at a bad time. If appropriate, please include a trigger warning. Before you submit, make sure that it will not violate our submission guidelines (see the full list below).
Recently, there’s been a few people in the lit community who have been exposed as predators and abusers. We want our publication to be a safe space:
If you are a survivor and we have published the work of someone who has harmed you, please let us know who and what would feel like a just response to you. We’ve created a report form (with suggested actions) if you do not feel comfortable reaching out via email.
Rights, publication, copies, and payment information:
You retain the rights to your pieces after publication in our zine. We encourage you to submit your piece to other publications after it has appeared in ours (if their submissions allow it), we just ask that you acknowledge that it was previously published in ours first. We fully accept pieces that have been published elsewhere (if their submissions allow it) and will be happy to acknowledge that it was published elsewhere first. We want to get your creations in front of as many people as possible and are happy to do it!
Once the piece has been published, it is done. If we made a typo, we’d be happy to fix it, but we will not pull the piece or make any large edits. You have until the piece goes to print to make any changes to the piece. If there are large changes that change the tone, feeling, or reading of the piece, it will have to go back to our readers and may not be accepted with the changes.
That said, if there is a safety issue at any point and you need your piece pulled, please let us know. We will block out the page your piece appears in on the online issue.
Submitter copies. We can’t afford to send submitter copies. We beta tested it, and would have lost our shirts if it hadn’t been for a last-minute angel investor. We will send a PDF of the issue to any submitter who wants one so they can get it printed and we offer copies to our submitters at cost (typically around $5.50-7 per issue, depending largely on the number of color pages and how many copies). The reason for this price point is that we follow our values and contract with a local, woman-owned, Certifiably Green Denver Business, YellowDog Printing and Graphics, rather than a cheaper online company.
Who and how we pay. We wish we could pay everyone for their work, but we don’t make enough cash for that to be a possibility at this time. So, we will pay a token amount ($10) for unpublished works through PayPal or Venmo to our racially and ethnically marginalized submitters (BIPOC in the U.S., Canada, and Europe; as self-identified in other nations), gender variant (agender/greygender, bigender/polygender, intergender/intersex, nonbinary/gender non-conforming, transgender) submitters, and disabled submitters. (Submissions that arrived before the time this was changed will be grandfathered into our old guideline.)
Why these creatives specifically? Because these creatives are the least likely to be paid for their published works or equitably paid in their day jobs. Our publication has committed to prioritizing traditionally marginalized creators, and this is another way we can do that.
Thanks to a suggestion from Zoa Coudret, we will also be posting peoples’ PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, Ko-fi, or another payment platform so that readers can tip our creatives as well.
I apologize to anyone who came to us thinking we paid “Professional” rates due to the Duotrope listing. We asked them to change it to “Token Payment,” but, unfortunately, they said that in some circumstances (pieces that are 200 words or less) our $10 token payment would be considered “Professional.” While we wish we could pay “Professional” rates as listed on their definitions page, we make these payments out of our own pockets and can’t afford those rates. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience.
Things that will be rejected and could get you temporarily or permanently banned:
If your submission violates any of the guidelines below, you will be informed and temporarily banned from submitting for one month’s time. A rejection for violating a guideline is not the start of an argument. You don’t have to agree with our guidelines, but if you choose to submit to our publication, you have to follow our rules.
The temporary ban is as much for submitters as it is for us. We want to make sure that we are reviewing your submission with an open mind, and can’t do that if you are rapid firing “proof” that you can write something else. (This did happen recently, and it was very hard to divorce our feelings from the last submission when reading the new one.)
If it is a flagrant violation or you argue with us or respond aggressively to a rejection for any reason, you will be permanently banned.
Likewise, even if your submissions to us are not problematic, but we are informed of problematic behavior outside of our publication against people from marginalized communities and can verify it,you will not be welcome to our publication and we reserve the right to remove your work from past issues.
The piece implicates you in a crime.
The piece is partially or fully plagiarized.
The piece is AI-generated or the majority/focus of the piece makes use of images that were not created by you.
The piece uses fridging of marginalized people or children (the trope where a marginalized person is injured, killed, or demoralized in some way to move a privileged person’s story or character development forward).
The piece reduces people from marginalized genders or races to body parts, objects, or in another way dehumanizes them.
The piece’s main focus is sexual attraction or exploitation.
The piece is erotica or is sexually explicit.
The piece sexualizes a child. This means anyone under 18 years old, no matter what.
The piece glorifies or sexualizes violence against marginalized genders.
The piece mentions or implies molestation, sexual assault, or r*pe
There is NO wiggle room on this. Our editor is a survivor and will not subject themself to the pain of reading this.
Any violation of this guideline will result in an instant permanent ban from our publication. The trauma is too great and therapy is too expensive to deal with this.
The piece includes content or slurs that could be considered racist, xenophobic, queerphobic, transphobic, sexist, misogynistic, fetishist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, ableist, audistic, or in any other way offensive to a protected class or minority. Your piece will be rejected unless it is made clear within the piece or in an artist statement at the end that the behavior/language is unacceptable, proper content warnings are provided, and the word is in some way censored in the piece (vowels replaced with * as an example we’ve accepted). While I understand that some people are reclaiming words that have been used to disparage people that share an identity, not all our readers from that identity will be reclaiming that word and we need to think of their well-being as well.
Resources to help you create things that are appropriate for The B’K
