Thank you for your interest in Public Seminar. We are open for submissions: pitch us your essays, reviews, research, visions of the future and critiques of the classics.
Call for New School Emerging Critics
Public Seminar seeks emerging critics with an interest in the literary and performing arts (novels, poetry, theater, dance, music, film). We would like to mentor interested New School faculty, students, or staff interested in writing approximately three 750-word reviews a semester, on topics of their choice.
We offer authors an initial consultation with our executive editor, Jim Miller, who has extensive experience as a music and book critic—and careful editing by an engaged team of editors. We are open to reviews of contemporary works and classic pieces revisited. We’re especially interested in reviews of works by New School faculty and students.
To apply, please contact publicseminar@newschool.edu.
General Submissions
If you would like to publish with Public Seminar, please send us a pitch in keeping with the guidelines below. Pitches should be sent to publicseminar@newschool.edu. (Please do not send us the full text of your proposed piece until we ask for it.)
Our editorial team reviews all pitches. If your pitch is accepted, you will be assigned an editor, who will work closely with you in preparing the draft for publication.
Public Seminar regrets that we cannot pay its authors at this time.
Pitching: A Few Guidelines
Public Seminar serves an informed, non-specialist audience. Your article might be:
- An essay (1,200–1,8000 words). An in-depth examination of an event, an issue, or a text. Examples might be the equivalent of an op-ed, a revised talk given at a conference, a portion of a work in progress, or a response.
- A review (750–1,8000 words). Critical discussion of a book, movie, television show, website, exhibition—anything that a PS reader would care about and that lies roughly within your field of expertise.
- An interview (1,200–1,8000 words). Text may also be accompanied by video or audio clips.
- A book excerpt (1,200–1,8000 words). Selections from new releases or timely reissues. An excerpt may be accompanied by an author interview.
- A news report (800–1,000 words). Commentaries on breaking events are especially welcome: the author needs to be prepared to turn edits around quickly.
- A syllabus. We invite teachers and scholars to publish syllabi that may be of general interest to readers, or that respond to current events. These should be accompanied by a short paragraph that puts the syllabus in context.
- A letter (250–1,000 words). The equivalent of a blog post, and in most cases ought to be timely. Be prepared to turn around revisions quickly.
Your pitch should be short (a paragraph at most) and should include:
- A first sentence that sums up the article;
- Three to six sentences that explain the context and the significance of the story;
- Potential length.
If you have not written for us before, you should also include:
- A brief summary of your experience (two to three sentences). In other words, why are you the person to write the story?
Submitting Your Draft
The following conditions apply to both solicited and unsolicited submissions.
- Please include your name, your email address, the title/affiliation with which you wish to be identified, and a provisional title for your essay.
- Authors must submit a short (one-sentence) bio, a headshot and, if applicable, a social media handle.
- Essays and reviews should be 1,200–1,800 words and written for a general audience. We publish long-form articles only occasionally.
- Submissions must be in Microsoft Word.
- All work published in Public Seminar is edited and subject to fact-checking: please include hyperlink to any source that has informed your work. (We do not use footnote citations.)
- Public Seminar is not an image-heavy platform. Please check with us before submitting an essay that depends on numerous images or on videos.
- Normally, we do not accept an essay under consideration elsewhere. Please let us know if this is a simultaneous submission.
- Public Seminar does publish reprints, as well as excerpts from recently published and forthcoming books. Publication is contingent on authors demonstrating that they can assign rights or Public Seminar obtaining those rights independently.
- Your editor will work with you on setting deadlines. Publication of submissions depends on the timely completion of revisions by the author.
- Authors may suggest a title or subtitle, but Public Seminar reserves the right to choose titles and feature images.
Licensing
- All original content published at Public Seminar becomes the property of Public Seminar, subject to a CC BY 4.0 license. This license does not apply to copyrighted material featured courtesy of another publisher, such as journal, blog, or book excerpts and reprints.
- We only publish images to which we have legal rights.
- We only remove essays for cause, such as the discovery that an essay is inaccurate, plagiarized, or defamatory. We do not remove essays because the author no longer supports the views they have published on our platform. We do encourage response essays that contribute to debate or reconsider a position with new insight.
