Submissions: Personal Essays, Articles and Non-Fiction

Our submissions are open until January 18th 2024.

What We Are Looking For

We’ve put together some tips to help you put your submission together:

What we are looking for from teen writers: anything that interests you! This journal is for and by you. Talk about your love for arts, sports, change you want to see, your experiences. If you feel passionate enough to write about it, we want to read it! We would love to read your personal essays. Don’t be afraid to use the first person.
We are keen to read essays and articles discussing themes in teen and YA literature, an interview with an author or organisation, a review of a literary event, etc. We are also open to essays and ideas on film, theatre and art.
Proposals are accepted. (See our guidelines below!)
If you want to send a completed essay, great! Just remember we don’t accept academic essays.
If in doubt, ask! Email us at paperlanternsjournal@gmail.com with any questions.
Familiarise yourself with what we’ve already published. For example: essays on their love for ballet; learning to read Jane Austen; the representation of mental health in YA lit; career paths for book lovers. You can read an example of a past feature here:
“A Poppy in a Field of Daffodils: Discovering Diversity in Ballet” by Rebecca Downey

We are particularly interested in essays from teenage writers. If you’d like to write an essay, but you’re not sure where to begin, you can email us at paperlanternsjournal@gmail.com and we would be delighted to see if we can help.

We will accept submissions in one of two formats:

A features proposal. This is an outline of what kind of feature you would like to work on. Please include
– Details of your topic, research that will need to be conducted.
– Why it is of interest to a teen and YA audience.
– Support required from Paper Lanterns (arranging author interviews/access to information that is not readily available to you/etc).
The proposal should be max 500 words.
A completed feature/essay/interview. The content should be suitable and of interest to a teen and YA audience. Paper Lanterns reserves the right to edit a completed feature to comply with our policies, when necessary.
The completed feature should be max 1800 words.
We do not accept completed essays written for an academic audience. This includes essays written for an undergrad. We are happy to look at these essays if they are rewritten to be accessible to a teenage audience.

Please note:

The features process is a largely collaborative effort, where you will be working closely with Paper Lanterns staff, should your submission be selected.

If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to email paperlanternsjournal@gmail.com

Please be sure to read and adhere to these guidelines carefully, or your submission will not be considered.

You must be 13+ years old to submit.
Format: Microsoft Word document. Font size 12, in Calibri or Times New Roman, ideally.
Each proposal/completed feature should be in a separate document.
Please label your file with the title of your piece. Do not include your name in the document.
Please fill out the subject of the email: Features – Title
Please include your full name in the body of the email (feel free to include a short cover letter introducing yourself and a little bit about your work).
Please send your work to: submit.paperlanterns@gmail.com
You are welcome to make multiple submissions. We will accept THREE non-fiction submissions. Please submit each piece in a separate and titled document.
You will receive an automatic email response, requesting you to fill out a Google form. The form is also available to fill out here.
Please note that we cannot offer feedback on unsuccessful submissions.
We do not accept work that has been published elsewhere.
We accept simultaneous submissions, but we ask you to notify us immediately if your submission has been accepted elsewhere.
If we love your piece, but it’s not the right fit for our next issue, we will keep your submission on file for two submission cycles in case we find space for it later on.
Submissions can be on any topic. Our only criteria is that your submission is written for a teen and young adult audience. While we are very open to the content of the submissions, we will not accept any pieces that are prejudiced in nature. We will not accept pieces that include, but are not limited to: sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or classist content.