Submit

Are you a UBC student looking to be published? If you are an academic, creative writer or multimedia artist, The Garden Statuary would love to see your work! Submissions are now open for our

We have two submission deadlines, one for our Winter Issue and one for our Spring Issue. Both issues will are published online, with a combined yearly edition published later in the year.

Accepted Genres

We currently accept academic essays, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual art, and photography. Please reach out to us at thegardenstatuary@gmail.com if you are interested in submitting work in another genre or medium.

Submissions are open to all UBC undergraduate students from both Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. We are dedicated to publishing excellent undergraduate work, and we are also mindful of the traditionally exclusive nature of academia. The Garden Statuary is especially eager to receive submissions from traditionally underrepresented voices, including those from Indigenous people, people of colour, queer people, people from lower income backgrounds, neurodiverse people, and people with varying abilities and disabilities. If you have any concerns about the accessibility of our submission process and publishing process, please reach out to us and we will do our best to find solutions and accommodations to support you!

Timeline and Deadlines

We are currently accepting content submissions for our Winter Issue! Please follow the instructions below and submit your content by the following deadline: Friday, October 10th, 2025 at 11:59 pm PST.

How to Submit Your Work

Students are invited to submit up to FOUR works per semester in any genre or combination of genres.

Please email your work to thegardenstatuary@gmail.com with the following format:

  • Submission – Your Name

If you plan to submit more than one piece, please attach each work as a separate document rather than one combined file. We prefer receiving documents in a Word document format for ease of editing and review, but other file types can also work provided we are able to read the work. If you do not have Microsoft Word, please submit your work in another format that will allow us to clearly view, copy and paste.

The genre of your piece should be included in the document’s file name or stated within the body of your email. For example:

  • Prose Submission 1 – Your Name
  • Poetry Submission 1 – Your Name
  • Poetry Submission 2 – Your Name
  • Academic Submission 1 – Your Name

Please remove your name and any other identifying information from all pages of your submissions. All submissions are reviewed anonymously to prevent bias during the selection process.

Submission Guidelines

Please make sure your work adheres to the following guidelines before you submit. All submissions must also follow UBC’s procedures regarding academic integrity.

  • Academic Essays should be in DOC or DOCX format, a minimum of 3 pages and a maximum of 11 pages per submission, not including your works cited. Formatting should ideally be double-spaced, 12 point font with 1 inch margins. The topic should relate to English literature or language studies. We ask that you cite your sources in MLA style.
  • Creative Literary Work including prose, poetry, and nonfiction should be in DOC or DOCX format and a maximum of 15 pages per submission. Prose should ideally also be double-spaced, 12 point font with 1 inch margins.
  • Visual Art and Photography should be in JPEG or PNG format. We accept and welcome a series or body of work. Please include an artist statement of 200 to 500 words per submission.

Please note that literary work must have not been published before; however, we do accept visual art and photography that has been previously published if the previous publication date was at least 90 days before our own publication date. See our copyright section for more info.

Copyright

If your submission is accepted to The Garden Statuary, we will ask for different kinds of copyright permissions depending on your genre of submission.

For all literary work:

  • We ask for First North American Serial Rights (FNASR) which means that the author grants the journal the right to be the first in North America to publish the author’s particular piece. Since our journal publishes both in print and online, we ask that this right apply to both these mediums.
  • We will also ask for the right to archive the author’s work on our website for at least three years, after which the author may choose to remove the work from public access. Some authors may feel that leaving their work up online detracts from its value. For instance, if they happen to republish their work in a marketable format (like a book), they may want to limit access strictly to that format.
  • Copyright reverts to the author 90 days after publication. This means that the author retains the right to the work and can republish it in whatever format they would like 90 days after its first appearance in The Garden Statuary. We do ask that the author cite The Garden Statuary as the first place of publication when the author republishes.
  • Why 90 days? Because we want readers to know they are reading something original on our pages – not something that might be published simultaneously elsewhere!
  • In granting us FNASR, the author guarantees that their work has not been previously published. We do not accept literary submissions that have been published before, but please let us know if you feel you are an exception to this rule.

For all photography and visual art:

  • We ask for One-Time Rights to publish both in print and online – which simply means the right to publish an author’s work once in both formats.
  • We also ask for the right to archive the author’s work on our website for three years, after which the author may choose to remove the work from public access. See reasons for this in “literary work” above.
  • We accept photographs and visual art that have been published before, but not if they have been published within the last 90 days.
  • The author retains the copyright to the work and may republish it in any format 90 days after its first appearance in The Garden Statuary (again, see reasons in “literary work” above). You do not have to cite The Garden Statuary in subsequent publications.

The Garden Statuary does not ask for the full copyright to any work, those rights stay with you.

Questions?

Please reach out to us at thegardenstatuary@gmail.com; we will get back to you as soon as we can.