The MAYDAY Culture section is looking for enthusiastic, incisive cultural commentary and critical analysis. With an emphasis on diverse or marginalized perspectives, Culture explores politics, race, gender, sexuality, and ability across all forms of art: literature, cinema, television, music, art, theatre, etc. We want arts criticism that's exciting, energetic, and fresh.

Please avoid academic style and tone. No footnotes! There's no minimum length, but we prefer submissions with fewer than 6,000 words. Please send only one Culture submission at a time.

All Culture submissions will be edited before publication. In submitting, you agree that, if your piece should be accepted, the editors will revise your work before it will be published. MAYDAY pays $20 per article. Payment issued upon publication.

We accept pitches, too! Review our editors’ statements below, and feel free to pitch to us via email.

Clement Obropta is interested in pitches for enthusiastic and incisive arts criticism and theory, especially focusing on film, television, video games, and music.

Lisa Ströhm Winberg is interested in pitches that center around visual art, semiotics in design, and fashion as an art form. Lisa is especially interested in pitches about fashion theories and visual analysis of photography.

“More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees – those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting, and internet publishing industries – are non-Hispanic whites.” (Pew Research) 

This segregation drives and ensures a standard of media production that fails spectacularly to capture and reflect the experiences, ideas, and interests of Black people in America. 

At MAYDAY:Black, the Black writer's voice and story are invited, encouraged, supported, and prioritized. 

Passionate to disrupt this long-time, strategic, and exclusionary media practice, Carla Bell, founding director of MAYDAY:Black, set out to honor and elevate stories written by, for, and about Black people – a fresh experience for all readers, and certainly for Black writers, including those seeking first-time publication. 

We welcome nonfiction work in opinions and analyses; personal, braided, and reported essays in contemporary and historical contexts. 

See representative stories in the January 6th Capitol Attack and Insurrection, inequities in Boston public schools, or The Black Manifesto. 

Bring your authentic, curious, courageous, well-rounded stories on life, living, love, loss, representation, race, racism, death, dying, Black plight and civil rights, neighborhood blight, gentrification, white flight, and more. (In no way is this an exhaustive list!)

Send your MD:B story draft  (800 to 3,000 words) via Submittable at no cost from anywhere in the world. English only, please.

We are looking for pieces that deserve a broader audience, that excite and inspire, that honor cultural heritage and move in the liminal space between borders sketched on maps with shaky hands; pieces that encourage a reader to question and engage with the world around them. We are especially interested in contemporary work from living authors, though it's by no means a requirement.
 

Poetry and prose from any language translated to English will be considered. We are also interested in book reviews and essays relevant to the art of literary translation. Please include a brief translator's note if you would like to provide context, artist bio, or other information important to the submitted piece. Before submitting, please ensure that your piece is thoroughly proofread and revised the way you’d like to see it published.
The translator must have secured rights for the translations submitted, or the work must be in the public domain.
 

Please include both the original and the translated text in Word files. If the source text contains characters difficult for Word to present correctly, a PDF scan is fine.