Drama

Choeofpleirn Press dedicates one annual journal to drama, both one-act plays and short screenplays, Rushing Thru the Dark. The annual deadline for submitting drama for publication is the last Sunday of August.

For drama, we want to see your most interesting human interactions with strong dialog and scene descriptions for either your one-act play or your short screenplay. As with any story, there needs to be some character development and a clear plot. See our Rushing Thru the Dark Autumn 2021 for examples of how to format both the stage plays and the screenplays. You can order a digital copy of the magazine through the Paypal portal below.

When submitting work to be considered:

1. make certain that one-act plays and screenplays are less than 90 pages long;

2. format your play in the Standard Playwriting Format, but without using any italics. Screenplays should follow the Standard Screenplay Format. We don't require title pages, so begin your play immediately after the Title and Your Name. 

3. save your work in a file labeled with your Surname and a brief portion of your play's title or the words "drama submission" as the file name 

4. Email your manuscript as an attachment in doc, docx, or rtf to ChoeofpleirnPress@gmail.com. Anyone who writes work in Pages should have their work converted to doc, docx, or rtf; 

5. include a 100-word third person biography (i.e. Jane Doe writes...) in the email with your submission. We recommend mentioning author webpages or blogs, publication history and educational successes, or any other relevant information that you feel you should share with us about yourself. This biography will be published in the same journal that your work appears in, if your work is accepted for publication, so it is another great way for your readers to follow your successes. 

6. specify which two theater groups (supply email addresses, please) you would like us to donate free digital copies of the magazine should your work be published, so be certain to add information about how such groups can contact you for permission to perform your plays or to produce your screenplays;

7. if you wish to submit more than one play or screenplay, please limit yourself to no more than three submissions a year and send each submission in a separate email.

Each submission must be written in English with non-English words italicized. We do not print works written in other languages, and we do not accept translations of works by other writers. Please do not use ALL CAPS anywhere other than for abbreviations. We do not accept translations of other writers' works. We also do not publish written works created with AI programming, which the U.S. Copyright Office has deemed non-copyrightable. Images transformed with digital programming are still acceptable, however.

Contributors who want their plays or screenplays entered in the Susan Hansell Drama Award must pay the $20 contest fee below (you only need to pay one fee for us to consider all three play submissions, since we will choose only one, typically, to publish). Only one paying contestant receives the $100 prize, but the top three paying entries are republished in the Best of Choeofpleirn Press annual issue and listed as finalists in the contest.

Submission of your work to Choeofpleirn Press means you are allowing us to print and copyright your work for the magazine issue in which your work appears. Realize, though, that writers retain their ownership of their works, but, if a work we publish is republished elsewhere, we ask that you acknowledge our literary journal as your work's first publication. 

We will copyright each journal, but creators of each piece we choose to publish will receive a free pdf file of that published journal. We ask that every winner of each contest allow us publication rights to the winning work for both the original journal it appears in and for the Choeofpleirn Best of  issue, published in December of each year. 

If you choose to submit materials for more than one creative category (i.e. poetry and fiction), please send separate emails for each genre of submission.

Choeofpleirn Press editors are English majors who understand the subjective and competitive nature of publication, but we promise to do our best to read every work as objectively as possible, and will never base our judgment on nationality, race, religion, or gender. 

Thank you for seeking a home for your creative work with Choeofpleirn Press!

If you would like to further assist our publication efforts, but would rather do so anonymously, please donate what you can.

Use the Paypal payment box below (you can use your credit card, if you prefer by using the black debit/credit button) to submit your payments for the creative contest you would like to enter. Select which creative contest in which you would like to enter your manuscript.