Please see our submission guidelines for more information.

We are particularly interested in compositions conceived from an ‘alternative’ Gen-X perspective. Just imagine that the North America of 1989 through 1995 never ended, the Spice Girls and the Internet never happened, and Justine Bieber was never even born. Copies of Pattern Recognition Nos 1 and 2 are available from Amazon.com.

Our previous issues have featured works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that grapple with harsh realities of everything from social media to systemic oppression and inspire us to fight against these barriers.

While we accept all styles — including experimental, hybrid, and conventional forms — we aren’t interested in submissions of light verse, genre fiction, and any piece that references gratuitous violence or exploitative sexual imagery. We’re committed to publishing a diverse range of poets and writers. In our debut issue (2017), 73% of our authors were women and 24% were writers of color. We also published pieces from writers in their 20s to writers in their 70s — and every decade in between. We welcome work from traditionally under-represented groups, including women writers, indigenous writers, writers of color, writers who identify as LGBTQ, and writers with disabilities.

Read the journal! We love diverse styles of quality writing from all over the world, but if your work doesn't respond to works of visual art, we can't use it. 

If you are someone who loves visual art and loves writing about visual art, we'd love to hear from you.

Surprise us. We want nothing less than to expand and redefine exkphrasis by stretching the concept to its limits. Show us artworks we've never seen, or show us our familiar favourites from a whole new perspective.  

We welcome poems on a variety of themes or subjects. We especially like to see work that, despite its excellence, has been overlooked or excluded by the patriarchy. SWWIM stands for Supporting Women Writers in Miami, where we run a reading series, but we publish writers from all over the world. We nominate for all award anthologies and prizes. Subscribe for a poem delivered to your in-box every weekday to get a sense of our aesthetic and follow/like us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @swwimmiami where we re-post all the work and announce fee-free submission periods.