Chapter House Journal

We are drifting deeper into the constellation of our Summer 2026 issue, Celestial Bodies: Honoring the Stars, the Moon, and Sky. As we launch the Indigenous Creative Nonfiction Prize, we’re honored to introduce the guiding star for this year’s selection. Guest Judge Cynthia J. Sylvester, born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and an enrolled member of the Diné, brings a luminous and grounded vision to the work ahead. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, she is the author of The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), winner of Best LGBTQ+ Book at the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Her work moves like starlight across identity, memory, and belonging, exactly the kind of gravity this prize was built to orbit. The Indigenous Creative Nonfiction Prize continues its mission this season, now with Cynthia J. Sylvester helping guide the constellation. Submit at link in our IG bio.

Transmission incoming from Chapter House Journal: For our Summer 2026 issue, Celestial Bodies, we’re opening a new submission portal in the stars. Signal Window: May 1 – June 30, 2026 Upload portal: Submittable, linked in our IG bio We’re calling in interviews and reviews orbiting Indigenous writers, thinkers, and scholars, voices moving through knowledge systems, story fields, and living constellations. What we’re tuning our instruments for: • Interviews with Indigenous writers, artists, scholars, and cultural workers • Reviews of books by Indigenous authors published within the last 5 years • Work that engages theme, story, and voice with care, context, and relational gravity Accepted transmission formats: • Text (interviews or reviews) • Audio (captured conversations from the field) • Video (visual essays / recorded transmissions) Send us your signals. We’re listening across deep space.

Submissions open May 1st through June 30th for the Indigenous Creative Nonfiction Prize, part of the Chapter House Journal Summer 2026 issue: Celestial Bodies 🌙✨ On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II, sending a crew on a nine-day journey looping the moon, sharing images, sound, and story back to Earth. A reminder: we are only a small part of an immense, living history of Nihimá Nahasdzáán, of Yethi’nisténha Ohóntsya, of Uŋčí Makhá, and of all our relatives whose names for Earth are not recorded. We invite Indigenous voices to write into the cosmos, creative nonfiction that orbits memory, land, language, and relation. Tell us what the sky holds. Tell us what Earth remembers. How do your stories move between ground and galaxy? What truths return when we look outward, and inward, at once? Send us your work. Let it travel like signal, like prayer, like light. Submit via Submittable, or link in bio on our IG page.

Submissions are about to launch. From May 1st through June 30th, we’re opening our channels for the Chapter House Journal – Summer 2026 Issue. This season’s theme: Celestial Bodies ✨ We’re calling on your constellations of thought, your stardust-lined poems, lunar-soaked prose, and sky-bound imaginings. Trace the gravity between words. Map the quiet pull of the moon. Burn bright, collapse, or expand, just don’t stay earthbound. What does the universe whisper to you when the world goes silent? What stories flicker in your personal galaxy? Send us your work and let it drift across our pages like light traveling through the dark. The cosmos is vast. Your voice belongs in it. Submit via Submittable, or link in bio on our IG page.

We’re honored to nominate “Arizona Abecedarian” by Cheyenne Dakota Williams and “ka naʻi aupuni” by Donavan Kamakani Albano for the 2026 Best New Poets anthology. Two poems that carry land, language, and lineage forward with care and power. Congratulations to these writers. ✨

✨ Our Winter Issue is here ✨ Our most robust edition yet, featuring a vast array of writers: Reflections on Gerald Vizenor’s career, an interview with Brandon Hobson on his new book, a review of Beverly Morris’s work on Unangan history, and more. As we write, we also reflect. Memories, whether inherited or lived, explore relationships, encounters, and cultural ripples. Who do we see in the water’s reflection? Whose voices echo in the quiet moments? These writers meet their own gaze, asking us to do the same. 📬 Read the Winter Issue now. Link in (our Instagram) bio.

✨Chapter House Journal Community✨ A small note carried on the wind: Chapter House Journal is being considered for the Best Lit Mags of 2025 by @chillsubs_official and the doors to voting have opened. For a moment, readers and writers everywhere can choose up to five magazines that moved them, startled them, held them. They can leave little constellations of tags like: 💎 Hidden Gem 🚀 Career Builder 🌈 Actually Inclusive 🔥 Bold & Weird 🎨 Beautiful Design 📚 New-Writer Friendly ❤️ I Just Love Them! These words don’t disappear. They become part of a magazine’s story, quiet, permanent, glowing on the Chill Subs page. And for the journals that rise to the top, a few gifts wait: 💰 a $300 offering 📣 a shout carried to 100,000 readers 📱 a celebration across 90,000 more 🌐 a place among the Best Lit Mags of 2025 If Chapter House Journal has ever met you at the right time, held your work, or warmed your imagination, we’d be honored if you’d take a minute to vote. 👉 Vote: chillsubs.com/best-lit-mag-awards (Link in bio.) Thank you for being part of this strange, bright little house we’re building together. 📖✨

Take a look at part 1 of the magazines participating in our event, Between The Lines: A Literary Speakeasy, at FUSION | The Cell on November 6, at 7 PM! We also introduce 3 out of our 6 panelists! Visit the link in our bio to see the full lineup of magazines, Q&A panel, and readers. Slide 1: Oona Uishama Narváez (she/they) is an Indigenous / Mexican American writer and artist from El Paso, Texas as well as the poetry and senior editor of Chapter House Journal. Chapter House Journal is an online literary journal committed to empowering and uplifting Indigenous and marginalized stories, values, cultures, and art. Slide 2: The Fronteristxs is a collective of artists and writers that fight for migrant justice and abolition of the prison industrial complex in the southwest borderlands of the United States. Slide 3: Emily Withnall (she/her) grew up in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and currently resides in Santa Fe where she is the editor-in-chief of El Palacio magazine. El Palacio was founded in 1913 and is the magazine of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and publishes art, poetry, essays, and articles pertaining to the art, culture, and history of New Mexico. Slide 4: Limina, formally Best Student Essays (BSE), is the premiere nonfiction student review of the University of New Mexico. Slide 5: Eli Manuel Behrens (he/they) is the managing editor for Conceptions Southwest (2025-2026). Conceptions Southwest (CSW) is the premier literature and arts publication created by and for the University of New Mexico community. RSVP if you plan to attend! Link in bio… FUSION | The Cell 700 1st St. NW Albuquerque, NM 87102 --- #abqevents #litmags #literarymagazine #publishing #writingcommunity

🌨️ Call for Submissions: Poetry Chapter House Journal 2025 Winter Issue: Release, Submissions open Nov 1st, 2025 at link in bio 🪶 In many Indigenous communities, winter is a time for stories, spoken, remembered, sung. We’re calling in poems that move with the season, the quiet, the break, the breath between. What are you laying down? What still speaks beneath the snow? What do you carry into the dark, and what light do you return with? We welcome work that honors cycles of grief and growth, silence and sound, poems that root, reckon, and rise. 🕯 Let your words sit with the fire. #CallForSubmissions #PoetryCall #IndigenousPoetry #ChapterHouseJournal #WinterIssue #PoetsOfInstagram #IndigenousWriters #SeasonOfStory #PoetrySubmissions

🌀 Call for Submissions: Creative Nonfiction Chapter House Journal 2025 Winter Issue: Release, Reimagine, Re(Cycle) Submissions open November 1st, 20256 via link in bio ❄️ Winter is a time of storytelling, of gathering, grieving, remembering, and imagining. In many Indigenous communities, it’s a season to sit with what has passed and what’s still becoming. For this issue, we’re looking for creative nonfiction that moves with the cycles of life, rest, and renewal. What are you shedding? What memory keeps returning? What stories live close to the fire, waiting to be told? Send us work that honors grief, joy, kinship, ceremony, and change, work rooted in place, in ancestors, in truth-telling. ✨ Let your story warm the winter fire. #CallForSubmissions #CreativeNonfiction #IndigenousWriters #ChapterHouseJournal #WinterIssue #NonfictionWriters #IndigenousStorytelling #EssayCall #MemoirWriters

🌌 Call for Submissions: Literary Fiction Chapter House Journal 2025 Winter Issue Submissions open November 1st, 2025 🕯️ As the cold settles in, stories rise up. In many Indigenous communities, winter is a time to gather, remember, and speak the truths that summer kept quiet. We’re looking for fiction that leans into the hush of winter. Stories that hold complexity, that remember what’s been lost, and imagine what might come next. 🌾 Write into the dark. Write what lingers. Write what carries us through. We welcome short fiction grounded in kinship, transformation, tension, and care, stories that stay with us like breath on cold glass. 🔥 Let the winter tell it through you. #ChapterHouseJournal #FictionCall #LiteraryFiction #IndigenousLit #ShortStoryCall #WinterSubmissions #IndigenousStorytelling #FictionWriters

🌀 Call for Submissions: Visual Arts & Practices Chapter House Journal 2025 Winter Issue: Release, Reimagine, Re(Cycle) Submissions open November 1st, 2025 via link in bio ❄️ In many Indigenous communities, winter is a season of storytelling, a time to reflect, release, and remember. For our upcoming issue, we’re calling in visual works that speak to the cycles of life, loss, rest, and renewal. 🌱 What are you letting go of? What are you carrying forward? What seeds are you planting for the year to come? We’re looking for art that honors this (re)generative season, work that roots us in stillness, memory, and movement. ✨ Let your practice speak to the winter fire. #CallForSubmissions #IndigenousArt #VisualArts #ChapterHouseJournal #WinterIssue #ArtCall #IndigenousStorytelling #SeasonOfRest