2026 Home Double Issue: Call for Submissions
I have fought against it for years, ran away from it, damn the bulk of it to hell, and still I drive back. It is instinct. It is what birds do. It is something only someone in exile could ever understand. —Lauren Stroh
Your voice, its varied rhythms and registers, was always a surprise and then a wide smile. How is it that you could be anywhere in the whole wide world and still sound like you and us and home? —Zandria F. Robinson
What makes a place feel like home? Is it an inbuilt connection to the land? Fond memories of a childhood bedroom or family table? A sense of pride and shared community?
The Oxford American is now accepting pitches for our special Summer/Fall 2026 double issue dedicated to Home. It’s an idea as gloriously complicated as the South itself, and we’re interested in works across genres that tackle it from all angles. We think of home as our region, but also as our physical houses and apartments. Home can be our sanctuary, but also our cage. It can represent our connection to a community, and can be troubled by violence, displacement, and loss within that community. It’s deeply personal, but always political.
We want stories about how an idea of a home can change when you leave it, whether by choice or by force. We wonder how our domestic lives—our messy rooms, our packed closets, our dustless collections—reflect or inform the social life of the South. We welcome meditations on homesickness, personal histories of home-making, and polemics against a “home sweet home.” We would love to read critiques of domestic architecture, investigations of threatened ecological homelands, and reports from neighborhoods affected by ICE raids. Where are your second homes, your spiritual homes, and how do they thrive? No subject is too great or small, no setting too famous or too obscure, so long as the story is fresh. We learned long ago to follow our writers’ passions.
We’re seeking reported features, personal essays, short stories, short dispatches and meditations, poems, cultural criticism, and work that does not fit neatly into a specific genre or form. For fiction and poetry, full drafts may be submitted; for nonfiction work, please send us a pitch.
The ideal Oxford American pitch will be well-crafted and thoughtful, with a strong sense of the story’s setting, characters, and narrative possibilities. Enthusiasm, surprise, and originality are essential to an Oxford American essay; please pitch a story rather than a subject. In all pitches, we like to see high quality writing; passion for the subject and command of the idea; an explanation of the scope in the proposed piece; and familiarity with the Oxford American.
We will be accepting pitches through Submittable only for this project. Please submit by April 3rd. We will accept pitches on a rolling basis. Drafts will be due beginning in late April.
GENERAL INFORMATION
The editorial mission of the Oxford American is to explore the complexity and vitality of the American South. If your work does not somehow engage with the American South—however you choose to define it—it is probably not a good fit for the OA.
We will respond to all pitches and submissions by May 1st, 2026.
The Home Issue will be on newsstands nationwide August 11th, 2026.
Compensation will depend on the length and complexity of the story; all writers will be paid. Generally, fees will range from $300 for short dispatches to $1,500 for reported features.
Oxford American Home Issue Pitch
The South has always had a genius for exile. It produces, with extraordinary efficiency, folks who love it too much to stay and miss it too much to leave. Folks who carry it in their mouths and their manners ten states away and still cannot tell you whether what they feel is pride or grief or both at once. I am one of those folks. I have spent two decades chasing home backwards, only to find it always behind me, where I was, never where I am. Now I wonder whether what I continue to chase is the exile itself: not just from a place I can name on a map, but from the self I have not yet, and may never actually, finish building.
The essay moves along the geography of that exile the same way memory does when you're homesick: not forward, but toward. It begins on a couch in Little Rock in 2020, where I am on the phone with my best friend in Wisconsin, the place I had left only months before. I am crying, telling her that the city I came back to reclaim is a place I no longer recognize myself inside. She tells me that is exactly how she feels about Colorado. Madison is home now, she says, and then without skipping a beat: when are you coming home? Six years later she still asks me that. This essay is, in part, an attempt to finally answer her. It tracks the moments across time when a place shifted tense on me, when it stopped being where I was and became where I had been. It asks what it means to build an identity around a region whose mythology was never written to include the kind of southerner I was becoming and still turning out to be. It ends not with arrival but with the question that has tightened in my chest the whole way through: what if the home I am finally trying to return to turns out to be just another place I chased backwards, only to find it was never made for me either?
This is a personal essay running approximately 3,500 to 4,000 words. It moves roughly chronologically but follows the logic of longing rather than a calendar, built from specific scenes across two decades: a small Arkansas town I left convinced I was outgrowing it, a college town in Wisconsin where I became someone I did not expect, a couch in Little Rock where that man returned to an expected sanctuary but found a city that no longer recognized him, a Uhaul pointed east, a grandmother's yard in coastal North Carolina where I am being "taught," at nearly thirty-eight, what tools and tractor parts are called. The facts are experiential, accumulated through memory, but the argument they build toward is structural: the South's most defining export has always been the people it forged in fire but could not keep, and learning to exist inside that realization, without the comfort of a place to point to and call home, may be the most southern thing I have ever done.
I am a writing enthusiast and online tutor currently living in coastal North Carolina but calls Little Rock, Arkansas "home". I would describe myself as a man who loves the South out loud despite the complicated contradictions. I have been a reader and intermittent print subscriber of the Oxford American for years, and am a particular fan of the music issues and the southern lit edition. I was a fan of attending live tapings of "Tales From the South" when I could as I enjoy hearing the autobiographical accounts of life in the south across generations and classes, examining what exactly it means to call oneself a Southerner. I write and record the stories of others because I believe the South deserves to be examined honestly, with full affection but also full accountability. And I have not yet found a better way to catalog and examine my own complicated thoughts surrounding my southern identity than to turn them into prose and see if they stand.