You’ve been polishing your story or essay and now you’re ready to take the big leap and submit it to literary journals, but just how do you do that? In this class, you’ll learn about many of the hundreds of literary journals out there waiting for your work, both the perennial heavyweights and the up-and-comers.

We’ll discuss cover letters, do’s and don’ts for submissions, the transition many journals have made from print to online submission and publication, and whether or not you have to obey the “no simultaneous submission” policy. We’ll investigate ways of tracking your submissions, useful websites for researching literary magazines, how to gauge whether you received a “good” rejection or a form rejection, and how to know when to keep submitting a piece, pull it for revisions, or put it in the recycle pile. By the end of this seminar, you’ll be armed with a thick-anti-rejection hide and a list of journals to submit your work to.Join us for an online Master Class with author Jenny Shank!

Jenny Shank grew up in Denver, Colorado, and earned degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado. Her short story collection “Mixed Company”won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and the Colorado Book Award in General Fiction in 2022. Her novel The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 2011) won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association’s Reading the West Book Awards, and a Tattered Cover Book Store Summer Reading 2011 selection.

Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust Magazine, Prairie Schooner,Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review,Michigan Quarterly Review, The Toast, Offline, Image, Printer’s Row, Barrelhouse, Rocky Mountain News, Dallas Morning News, High Country News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, PBS MediaShift, The Rumpus, 5280, The Huffington Post,The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, Dear McSweeney’s: Twenty-Two Years of Letters from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Love In The Time of Time’s Up, Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide, and We Can See Into Another Place: Mile High Writers on Social Justice. One of her stories was listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in the Best American Essays, three of her stories were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one received Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize anthology. She’s won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Society for Professional Journalists, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. 

Jenny Shank was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club for six years, and for four years she was the Books & Writers Editor of New West, which was named “Best Literary Blog” in the Westword Best of Denver issue. She was a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California. She has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, the Boulder Writing Studio and the Mile High MFA at Regis University, and she is currently on the faculty of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.