Welcome to The Indianola Review

Founded in 2015, The Indianola Review is a quarterly print journal dedicated to discovering and championing the best contemporary writing. Each issue brings together fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from emerging and established voices alike.

Our reading period runs from April 15 through December 15. We seek work that surprises us — stories with vivid characters and purposeful plots, poems that resonate, and essays that illuminate.

• Fiction: Up to 7,500 words; flash fiction up to 3 pieces (1,000 words each)
• Poetry: 3–5 pieces in a single Word document
• Nonfiction: Up to 7,500 words

All submissions are handled via Submittable.

A literary journal lives and breathes through the voices it amplifies. At The Indianola Review, we believe that exceptional writing can come from anywhere — from the seasoned author with a shelf of published works to the emerging writer sending out their first submission. Our quarterly issues are carefully curated to reflect a wide spectrum of human experience, rendered in prose and poetry that feels both urgent and enduring. We are drawn to work that lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned, the kind of writing that rewards rereading and resists easy categorization.

The heart of any memorable story lies in its characters. We look for fiction that places complex, fully realized people at the center of narratives that move with intention. Whether the setting is intimate or expansive, realistic or speculative, we want stories where the emotional stakes feel genuine and the prose demonstrates both craft and restraint. A well-told story does not need to shout; it simply needs to be true to the world it creates and the people who inhabit it. We publish fiction that respects the reader’s intelligence and invites them to dwell in uncertainty.

Poetry, at its best, distills something essential about being alive. We seek poems that balance music with meaning — work that attends to sound and rhythm without sacrificing clarity or emotional depth. The poems we publish often explore the spaces between things: between memory and forgetting, between joy and grief, between the spoken and the unspeakable. We welcome both formal verse and free verse, provided the language feels deliberate and the imagery resonates. A single well-crafted poem can reframe how a reader sees the world, and that possibility guides our selections.

Nonfiction in our pages spans the personal and the universal. We publish essays that investigate, reflect, and question — pieces rooted in lived experience that reach toward something larger than the self. Whether the subject is cultural, historical, or deeply intimate, we value honesty and nuance over easy conclusions. The best nonfiction reveals a mind at work, wrestling with ideas and memories in prose that is as carefully shaped as any fiction. We are interested in writers who can turn their attention outward as well as inward, connecting individual stories to broader currents of thought.

The relationship between a journal and its contributors is built on mutual respect and a shared commitment to the written word. Our reading period opens each spring and extends through the heart of winter, giving writers ample time to refine their submissions. We read every piece with care, knowing that behind each manuscript is a person who has labored over language and taken the risk of sending their work into the world. We strive to respond thoughtfully and in a timely manner, honoring the trust that writers place in us when they share their creative efforts.

Print endures in a way that digital often does not. There is something irreplaceable about holding a physical journal, about the weight of the paper and the permanence of ink on the page. Each issue of The Indianola Review is designed as an object worth keeping — a collection of voices bound together in a format that invites slow, attentive reading. In an age of constant scrolling and fleeting attention, we remain committed to the quiet pleasure of print, to the idea that literature deserves a tangible home and readers deserve an experience unmediated by screens.