54 Magazines & Websites That Publish Personal Essays

A personal essay market is only useful if the door is open, and half the fun of this genre is that the doors move. So here are fifty-four places a writer can send first-person work right now, with what each one pays, when it reads, and what it wants.

The national magazines come first, then the smaller and independent titles, then the literary journals where memoir and the lyric essay really live. Eight more are here because they are worth knowing about even though they do not take personal essays. If you want the wider view afterwards, browse the full catalog of publishing companies.

Reading windows and rates change without notice, so check the magazine’s own guidelines before you send anything. Last verified: July 31, 2026.

National Magazines, Newspapers, And Sites

These pay, and most of them pay well. They also reject at scale, so read the guidelines before you send anything.

1. The New York Times – Modern Love

The most competitive personal essay slot in the English language, and still an open door. Modern Love accepts submissions of true stories about finding love, losing love, and trying to keep it alive: adoption, polyamory, technology, race, friendship, anything that fits the column’s heading. The editors ask that an essay spring from a central dilemma you have faced, and they explicitly encourage Black and Indigenous writers, other writers of color, writers outside the United States, and LGBTQ writers to send work.

2. The New York Times – Opinion Essays

The section formerly called Op-Ed. Times Opinion accepts submissions through a form, typically 800 to 1,200 words, built on an argument drawn from your expertise or your experience. Essays must be original and exclusive to the Times, and a writer whose piece is accepted is asked to supply an annotated copy listing a source for every factual assertion. Past errors count against a writer’s future work, which tells you how seriously they take the fact-check.

3. The Sun Magazine

The best-known home for the essay that is too raw for anywhere else. Its own guidelines invite the piece where you are so unguarded you need editors you can trust. The Sun accepts submissions of personal essays and pays from $200, scaled by length. It works on a monthly cap: once the month’s quota is reached the Submittable form closes, and it reopens on the first. Complete manuscripts only, no queries.

4. HuffPost Personal

An entire vertical built on first-person writing. HuffPost Personal accepts pitches at pitch@huffpost.com on identity, health and mental health, sex and relationships, family and parenting, work and money, body image, and unusual life experience. Every published contributor is paid. Note that huffpost.com refuses automated requests, so a link checker will tell you the route is dead. It is not.

5. Longreads

Longreads accepts pitches for researched and critical essays starting at $500, with the fee scaled to reporting and length. Personal essays work differently: the editors will not commission one from a pitch, so you send a completed draft, and the flat rate is $500. Everything goes to hello@longreads.com. It publishes no fiction.

6. Narratively

Narratively accepts submissions for The Personals, its series of short, sharply focused first-person stories built around a single surprising moment. The site is organized around memoir and hidden-life storytelling, so a writer arriving with one unforgettable episode is arriving in the right place.

7. Slate

Slate accepts pitches and publishes a page of editors with their beats and direct email addresses, including one who covers fame, health and beauty, personal essays, family, and school. The guidance is unusually concrete about what fails: an argument that is not fresh, a subject already covered, a full draft sent instead of a pitch.

8. The Atlantic

The Atlantic accepts pitches at named desks and not through one inbox: ideas@, culture@, family@, politics@, science@, and global@theatlantic.com. Fiction and poetry go in as full manuscripts. Ideas and Family are the two desks where a first-person argument most often lands.

9. The Guardian

The Guardian accepts unsolicited submissions from freelance contributors on a speculative basis: you send the piece, and you are paid at standard rates only if it runs. The contributors’ guide is a 1999 page the paper still maintains, which is either charming or a warning depending on your temperament, but it is current policy and it names the departments to approach.

10. The Globe and Mail

The daily First Person essay, formerly Facts & Arguments, is one of the few newspaper slots reserved for ordinary readers. The Globe accepts submissions of finished essays of 700 to 900 words to firstperson@globeandmail.com, pasted into the body of the email as well as attached, because the editors say plainly they will not click a link to read a submission. There is no payment, and the essay should be personal and not political.

11. Los Angeles Times

The Op-Ed page accepts submissions at oped@latimes.com, and only full drafts, because pitches and partial pieces are turned back. Work must be exclusive to the paper, including against your own blog and social accounts. If they want it you hear within about 48 hours; otherwise the volume means silence.

12. The Boston Globe

Globe Ideas accepts submissions at ideas@globe.com. Like the LA Times it wants a completed piece and not a pitch, and it wants it in the body of the email rather than attached. If you see Boston Globe Ideas listed separately elsewhere, it is this same desk at this same address.

13. Vice

The Life desk accepts pitches for mid-length reported essays and narrative features between 700 and 2,000 words, plus quick-turnaround blogs and longer features. The focus is how we relate to one another and to ourselves, and freelancers can pitch into the standing editorial series as well as one-off stories.

14. Vox Culture

Vox accepts pitches section by section and pays competitive rates based on the type and amount of work. Two cautions from its own page: it rarely takes an already-written piece, because editors prefer to shape a story from the start, and at any given moment several sections are not taking freelance pitches at all. The page is updated regularly, so check which desks are live before you write.

15. BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed accepts pitches and pays for published pieces. Personal essays have their own address, essay-pitch@buzzfeed.com; everything else goes to buzzfeedpitches@buzzfeed.com. The guide was last updated in May 2026 and lists the coverage areas currently open, which rotate by season. The longform vertical called BuzzFeed Reader no longer exists as a brand, but the freelance route does.

16. The Bold Italic

A San Francisco magazine that accepts pitches for reported and personal pieces, with a taste for essays that are funny, moving, or strange about life in the Bay Area. One thing to know before you spend a day on a draft: the site states on this same page that it needs a budget before it can pay freelancers.

17. Refinery29

Refinery29 accepts pitches across work and money, relationships, wellness, beauty, social justice, and politics, and it names personal essays with a distinct angle as a category it wants. Fiction and poetry are outside its range. One oddity worth flagging: the guide still live is the Australian edition’s, and Australia no longer appears among the editions Refinery29 lists, so the guidance has outlived the edition that wrote it.

18. Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan UK accepts pitches of 200 to 250 words sent to the named Hearst editor for each section, with PITCH in the subject line. Speculative full features are unwanted, and the editors say they will never ask for one. Beauty in particular is looking for first-person perspective. Expect a fortnightly review cycle and a reply only if the answer is yes.

19. Bustle

Bustle accepts pitches from freelancers, and its editors’ guide is refreshingly specific about the mechanics: a sample headline as your subject line, a short introduction, links to related published work, then the pitch. Previously unpublished work only.

20. SELF

SELF accepts pitches for personal essays built on your own health and wellness experience, alongside reported service journalism. Rates start at $250 for short news pieces, $500 for reported service, and $750 for features. Feature pitches are rarely taken from outside, since the desk develops those in-house.

21. Autostraddle

Autostraddle accepts submissions through a form and nothing else, so emailed pitches are turned away, which is stated twice on the page. Current appetite runs to dating and relationships, queer culture, trend pieces, and women’s sports.

22. Eater Voices

Eater Voices accepts pitches at voices@eater.com: a couple of paragraphs on what you want to write and why you are the person to write it. The published run shows the range: restaurant closures, life with a feeding tube, alcohol in the industry. A food connection is required, a recipe is not.

23. Conde Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler accepts pitches organized by franchise, each with a named editor, and rates start at $300 for 500 to 600 words. Several strands take first-person work, including Women Who Travel and its outdoors coverage, though the bar for a personal travel essay is a takeaway that reaches past the author. Pitches only, because pre-written stories on spec are declined.

24. Harper’s Magazine

Harper’s works by post, which surprises people. It accepts unsolicited queries for nonfiction sent by mail to its Broadway address, and it reads unsolicited fiction the same way; unsolicited poetry is returned unread. So an essayist’s route here is a mailed query and not a finished manuscript. Ideas for the Readings section are welcomed by email.

25. Education Week

Education Week accepts submissions of opinion and first-person essays between 600 and 1,000 words at Opinion@educationweek.org, from teachers, principals, researchers, and anyone else deeply involved in the field. It does not typically pay. Generative-AI use must be disclosed to the editors beforehand, and simultaneous submissions are discouraged.

Canadian Magazines

Several of these read Canadian writers only, and one says so flatly. Rates are in Canadian dollars.

26. The Walrus

The Walrus accepts submissions of reporting, essays, fiction, poetry, and visual essays across politics, the arts, science and environment, health, business, sport, technology, and international affairs. It runs eight print issues a year plus daily online publishing. Fiction is the exception to the open door: that inbox now opens only from 1 January to 28 February and 1 June to 31 July.

27. Broadview

A magazine of ethics, faith, and justice that accepts submissions of first-person narratives, essays, photo essays, profiles, and reported features. The editors prefer a query before you write, sent to the editor’s own address, and they pay within 30 days of receiving your invoice. Fiction is almost never published and poetry only from published poets.

28. This Magazine

This Magazine accepts queries, and only queries, since completed manuscripts are declined as a matter of policy protecting both sides on copyright. It publishes literary journalism, essays, and memoir from a social-justice angle, and it publishes Canadian residents only. Features pay $150 to $300, columns $60 to $100. Toronto-focused pitches arrive in greater numbers than it can use.

29. Geist Magazine

Geist accepts submissions through Submittable in rotating category windows, so which door is open depends on when you knock. What it wants is well documented: short non-fiction under 2,000 words for Notes & Dispatches, typically personal narrative, paying $100 to $300; longform essays up to 5,000 words as Features, paying up to $650; and braided, lyric, and hermit-crab essays for the experimental slots at $100 per page. Writing grounded in a sense of place does especially well. AI-developed work is not considered original.

30. Briarpatch Magazine

Briarpatch accepts pitches at pitch@briarpatchmagazine.com, an address it publishes on its own homepage. Go straight there: Briarpatch’s own submissions page is a 404, and the homepage is where the live route sits.

31. Room Magazine

Canada’s oldest literary journal by and about women and gender-marginalized writers. Room accepts submissions through separate routes for poetry and prose, art, book reviews, and contests, and it runs a standing creative non-fiction section. It charges submission fees and documents them on a page of their own, so read that first.

32. Chatelaine

Chatelaine accepts queries of about a page, sent to letters@chatelaine.com with at least two published clips attached or linked. Finished articles are turned back. Commissioned pieces are contracted, rigorously fact-checked, and expected to lean on Canadian statistics and experts.

33. Literary Review of Canada

The LRC accepts unsolicited pitches for reviews and essays on a rolling basis, though it rarely takes already-completed work, so pitch the idea instead of sending the piece. Poetry is the exception, restricted to two dated reading windows a year.

Literary Journals That Read Creative Nonfiction

These are where memoir, the lyric essay, and the long personal essay actually live. Most read in windows instead of year-round, several charge a small fee, and a few pay properly.

34. AGNI

The strongest fit here for a literary personal essay. AGNI accepts submissions from 1 September to 31 May and names personal essays and memoir among exactly what it wants, while ruling out academic and purely journalistic writing. Nearly everything it publishes is unsolicited, which is not true of most journals at this level. Online submissions cost $3; paper submissions are free. It pays $30 per printed page for prose, to a $300 maximum.

35. Virginia Quarterly Review

VQR accepts submissions of essays, memoir, literary journalism, and investigative reporting through Submittable. Its reading periods work on quotas: once a genre fills, that window shuts. Pay is the reason to try: essays and literary journalism generally start at $1,000, around 25 cents a word. It receives more than 10,000 unsolicited pieces a year, so patience is part of the deal.

36. Griffith Review

An Australian journal that accepts submissions of essays, memoir, reportage, and visual essays, mostly through themed call-outs with published open and close dates, plus rolling non-fiction pitches for its online platform. It pays AUD$0.75 per word for commissioned print work and AUD$500 per online piece. Its writers’ guidelines live under For Writers.

37. The Georgia Review

The Georgia Review accepts submissions online and by post from 15 August to 15 May, and it states plainly that work arriving outside that period is not read. Every submission is read by a published writer in a salaried position, and it aims to respond within ten months. Online submissions carry a $3 fee, waived for subscribers; paper submissions are free.

38. Colorado Review

The rare journal here that reads nonfiction all year: it accepts submissions of nonfiction year-round, while fiction and poetry run only from 1 August to 31 March. It pays $300 for short stories and nonfiction. Submittable only; mailed submissions are no longer read. CSU faculty, staff, and current students are excluded, and alumni wait three years.

39. New England Review

NER accepts submissions in all genres from 1 March to 1 May and 1 September to 1 November, closing early if the allotted number arrives, so submitting at the start of a window matters. It pays $20 per page with a $50 minimum, plus copies and a subscription. The small online fee is waived if you subscribe at the same time, and waived on request for hardship; paper is accepted from writers who cannot use Submittable.

40. The Southern Review

The Southern Review accepts unsolicited submissions in all genres from 1 September to 1 January, through its own submissions manager, with a $3 service charge. Prose means one story or one essay at a time, rarely above 10,000 words. It pays $75 for the first printed page and $25 for each page after, capped at $300. AI use anywhere in a piece must be disclosed.

41. Shenandoah

Washington and Lee’s online biannual, free to all readers, which accepts submissions in named reading periods that vary by genre. Its creative nonfiction editor wants work rooted in the author’s obsessions and passions, intentional about structure, and willing to fold research and criticism into memoir, lyric essay, and personal essay. Reading periods are named per genre and announced on the page and its newsletter. The submission manager caps at 800 submissions a month. AI-generated text and images are barred.

42. New Letters

Founded in 1934 and still going. New Letters accepts submissions of fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews, through Submittable only, and unsolicited email is not read. It pays modestly, and is candid about that: roughly $25 for a book review, made as resources allow. A warning if you go checking on it yourself: newletters.org returns a tiny 404 page to automated requests on every path while serving the real site to a browser, so it reads as dead when it is not.

43. TriQuarterly

Northwestern’s journal, and one of the few anywhere that accepts submissions of video essays as a named category. Creative nonfiction, craft essays, and interviews are all wanted; craft essays and interviews are read year-round while the main genres open in September and April and close at a 500-submission cap. It pays $100 per prose piece. Submittable only, with a small reading fee. Its live route is the Submit page.

44. The Cincinnati Review

The Cincinnati Review accepts submissions for the print journal in three periods a year: they open on the first of September, December, and May and close on a cap, with occasional extra months announced on its social accounts. Its weekly online flash feature, miCRo, is open nearly year-round and takes nonfiction up to 500 words. It pays $25 per page for prose and $25 per miCRo post.

45. Boulevard Magazine

Boulevard accepts submissions from 1 November to 1 May through Submittable, with a $3 fee and no email submissions read. Prose runs up to 8,000 words. It pays $100 to $300 for prose and $50 to $250 for poetry. Genre work is outside its range: science fiction, erotica, westerns, horror, romance and children’s stories.

46. Alaska Quarterly Review

AQR accepts submissions through Submittable only, at $3, with separate dated windows per genre, so the nonfiction window and the fiction window rarely coincide. Photo essays should be queried before sending. If twelve weeks pass without word, the editors invite you to ask.

47. Bennington Review

A twice-yearly print journal that accepts submissions of creative nonfiction up to thirty pages through Submittable, paying $120 for prose of six typeset pages or under and $250 above that. It reads in a fixed annual window, and note that the dates printed on its page, 5 January to 15 March 2026, have passed without being replaced, so watch for the next announcement. Current and recent Bennington students, faculty, and staff are excluded.

48. Epoch Literary

Cornell’s print magazine, EPOCH, accepts submissions two ways with different rules. Electronic submissions open in August and January only, cost $3, and include a free-submission weekend in each period, with part of every fee going to the Cornell Prison Education Program. Mailed submissions are taken any time but read in September, October, February, and March; they cost nothing and require a stamped return envelope. It pays $100 to $500.

49. The Rappahannock Review

The University of Mary Washington’s journal, which accepts submissions of creative nonfiction ranging from flash to extended memoir: a single essay up to 8,000 words, or three shorter pieces. It wants essays with insightful perspective and attention to craft, and it also takes audio work, which few journals here do.

50. Quarter After Eight

An Ohio University journal devoted to experimental prose and the space between genres, which makes it a good home for an essay that does not behave like one. It accepts submissions in a single annual reading period, from 15 October to 15 April.

51. Barrelhouse

Barrelhouse accepts submissions right now for exactly one thing: an original personal essay under 1,000 words on a pop-cultural obsession, for its monthly newsletter. Print issues, online issues, book pitches, and conference proposals are all shut. It pays $50 to print and online contributors, and its position on AI-written submissions is the bluntest here.

52. HerStry

HerStry accepts submissions of creative nonfiction up to 5,000 words from women and nonbinary writers, publishing four themed issues a year with reading windows named well in advance through 2026 and 2027. It pays $50 per accepted piece. Cover letters are neither required nor read, and any work found to use AI-generated material earns a permanent ban.

53. Adelaide Literary Magazine

Adelaide accepts submissions all year round, in English and Portuguese, and names short memoir, personal essays, profile essays, lyric essays, and meditative essays among what it wants, up to 5,000 words, by email. Previously published and simultaneous submissions are both outside its rules.

54. bioStories

A magazine built entirely on personal narrative, and one of the last that charges nothing and uses no submission manager, having deliberately resisted both. It accepts submissions of original work by email, and asks writers to consider a voluntary donation with no bearing on acceptance. It cannot pay authors at present and says so directly. Work involving AI at any stage is not accepted.

Open To Writers, But Not For Personal Essays

These eight are all live and all reading, just not personal essays. They are here because they are commonly listed as essay markets, and knowing what each one really publishes saves you a wasted pitch.

55. The New Yorker

The New Yorker accepts unsolicited submissions of fiction, poetry, Shouts & Murmurs, cartoons, and short films, each with its own address and response window. For an essayist, though, the contact page rules out unsolicited Talk of the Town stories and other nonfiction, and the Shouts guidance rules out first-person essays specifically. A real open door, opening onto a different room.

56. Discover Magazine

Discover accepts pitches for its quarterly print magazine and its daily digital coverage, with editors named for each print section and a general address for the web. It wants science translated for a lay audience in a conversational voice, typically 600 to 1,000 words online, and not personal essays. Completed articles are unwanted.

57. American Short Fiction

Exactly what the name says. It accepts unsolicited submissions from September through December, one story at a time, with a $3 fee and Submittable only. There is no nonfiction category. Paper submissions are recycled on arrival.

58. One Teen Story

One Teen Story accepts submissions from writers aged 13 to 19 and publishes three stories a year, paying $500 each. It is young-adult fiction between 2,000 and 4,500 words, run as a contest with age brackets, and proof of age is required before publication. There is no longer a print edition.

59. Catapult

Catapult accepts submissions through Submittable, but for books. The Catapult magazine and its Don’t Write Alone column, which is where essayists were usually pointed, are now an archive: catapult.co redirects to the books site, whose own navigation labels the magazine as archived. The publishing house continues, with Counterpoint, Soft Skull, and Hawthorne alongside it.

60. E-International Relations

An open-access international-relations site run by a Bristol non-profit staffed by volunteer students and scholars. It accepts submissions of completed original work, not pitches, held to academic standards. One thing to know: E-IR now rejects on sight any essay written for a university assessment, so a repurposed term paper is a wasted send.

61. MLA Style Center

Not a magazine at all. The Modern Language Association accepts submissions of exemplary student research papers written in MLA style, for an annual online collection, from students aged 13 and up in high school, undergraduate, or graduate study. Selected authors receive a $50 gift card. English submissions are shut until next year; Spanish ones are still being read.

62. Babel: The Language Magazine

Not to be confused with Babbel, the language-learning app. This is Babel, a UK linguistics magazine, and it accepts submissions from linguists: feature articles, or pieces for standing sections like Languages of the World, with downloadable contributor guidelines for each. Excellent market, wrong reader, if you arrived expecting the app.

Names You May Be Looking For

Essayists ask about these titles constantly, and none of them is a route today. Here is where each one stands.

Five are alive but shut to submissions, in their own words. Aeon opens its Write for Aeon page by saying it is closed for pitches. Zoetrope: All-Story states on its about page that it is closed to general submissions at present and will post updated guidelines when that changes. The Antioch Review says it is in a thoughtful pause while it looks for a managing editor, working towards an editorial board and a digital submissions process, while its writers’ guidelines page, untouched, still describes mailed manuscripts and stamped envelopes. One Story has hit its cap for the period and reopens in the autumn, and in any case publishes a single short story per issue, not essays. The Threepenny Review reads only from 1 January to mid-April and turns away everything sent in the other eight months.

Three have closed for good. Bitch Media announced in April 2022 that it would shut after 26 years; its final Summer issue appeared that June. Its domain still resolves, but the server accepts a connection and never answers, which is why it still looks alive from the outside. The Gettysburg Review met a faster end: Gettysburg College’s president announced in October 2023 that it would publish one final issue in December and stop permanently, a decision its own editors said they learned about with everyone else. Its domain no longer resolves at all. Tin House Online is gone too: tinhouse.com now redirects to Zando’s imprint page for Tin House, which publishes no route for writers.

One domain has been taken over. The Temper was a magazine about drinking culture and recovery. Its submissions page is frozen mid-2021 with a closed banner, but the homepage on that domain now serves Latvian online-gambling affiliate content under an entirely different masthead. If you find a link to it, do not follow it.

Seven publish nothing a writer can use. Allure has no guidance of its own; the address that circulates comes from a 2022 job ad on a third-party media-jobs site. Elle’s is a closed one-off competition inviting 500 words on a hashtag, unpaid and limited to UK and Ireland residents. Marie Claire’s is a contact form and a newsletter sign-up. Jezebel is alive under Paste Media, alongside Paste and The A.V. Club, but no current pitching route could be found. Hazlitt is publishing steadily under Penguin Random House Canada, though its site refuses automated requests and its submissions page could not be read. Maisonneuve is thriving in print, with Issue 100 on newsstands in summer 2026, yet its contribute page is a 404, its contact page returns a server error, and no submissions page exists anywhere on the site. Medium is a platform and not a magazine: anyone can post, and its publications each set their own terms.

One is worth a look even though it has no entry above. DAME Magazine publishes throughout 2026 and runs its own pitch page, so if your essay is political or cultural, go and find it.

Before You Send Anything

Three patterns come up often enough across these markets to be worth passing on.

Windows matter more than quality at the literary journals. Roughly half of the journals above read for a few months a year, and several close early on a submission cap instead of a date: Georgia Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly and The Cincinnati Review all do. An essay sent in the first week of a window gets a very different reading from one sent in the last.

Fees are normal now, and small. Three dollars is the going rate at AGNI, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, and others. Most waive it: subscribe, submit on paper, or ask. AGNI and The Georgia Review both read paper submissions for free, and New England Review waives the fee for hardship on request.

The best-paying doors are not the hardest ones. VQR pays essayists from $1,000 and Colorado Review $300 for nonfiction it reads year-round, while several national outlets here pay nothing at all, the Globe and Mail’s First Person column and Education Week’s opinion page among them. Read the rate before you read the prestige.

If you write books as well as essays, the same checking exercise has been done for memoir publishers, traditional publishers, and hybrid publishing companies.