Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1858–1919

Submissions

Prairie Citizen is a forum of ideas about nature, community, and life in the grasslands.

We are seeking thoughtful, intelligent writing related to the Great Plains for our online journal. Our focus is on the environment, policy, culture (arts, humanities, social issues), and tech and science, especially when related to the environment and climate change.

We are following in the footsteps of the regional journal Prairie Fire, which was published from 2007 to 2015. Prairie Fire was informative, eclectic, thought-provoking, and entertaining, and we want Prairie Citizen to bear those same hallmarks.

Thank you for considering Prairie Citizen for your writing and thoughts.

Submission Guidelines

With your submission, you provide us with first publication rights to your submission. You retain all other rights to your work. Should your work be republished, we ask that you credit Prairie Citizen and note the date on which it was first published.

While we appreciate the flexibility of an online journal, we haven’t abandoned plans for print. We would like to produce a print product once funding is available. With your submission, you provide us with permission to include your work in that print product. We will confirm your participation before the publication is produced.

  • Our word count guideline is 750 to 3,000 words; longer works may be serialized.
  • Write to appeal to an educated—but not necessarily academic—audience in a way that is insightful, articulate, and entertaining.
  • We encourage you to provide context because it leads to understanding, and ideally, understanding leads to both personal and public action.
  • Accompany your writing by at least one relevant and appropriate image, as well as an author photo (headshot).
  • Specs for graphics: 300 ppi for color/grayscale; 1200 ppi for B&W; as physically large as possible (lower resolutions are OK for web but are not easily transferred to print when we move in that direction).
  • We do not accept pseudonyms unless the public use of the writer’s name would cause physical or financial harm to the writer and/or the writer’s family.
  • All writing will be edited to correct mechanical and objective errors and to conform to house style; we generally follow Chicago style, except for numbering (we use the alternate rule) and the occasional conflict with Merriam-Webster regarding spelling and hyphenation.
  • We require that your work be original and created by you. We do check for plagiarism as best we can, but we’re a small team and cannot guarantee there will be no plagiarism in our publications.
  • Submissions are unpaid.
  • Our editorial board reviews all submissions.

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