First, the announcement: The doors are open! Our Submission Manager is set once again for you to send us your submissions. As we noted in a blog post last week, we’ve altered our reading period to account for a backlog; we’ll now be accepting your stories, essays, and poems from September 1 through March 1. See our guidelines for more info.

Next, our apology, to the couple hundred of you who submitted late in our last submission period (roughly January through March) and haven’t yet heard a response. We regret that it’s taking so long to get back to you and are working hard to reply soon to your submissions. Because we had fewer volunteer readers in the past year and a changeover at the top of the masthead, we’re behind where we’d like to be at this point in the year. We don’t like making you wait, but we do accept simultaneous submissions for that reason. Rest assured that if you haven’t heard from us yet, you will soon, in plenty of time for you to send us something new. As we’d say if we were midcentury Catholics: nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa (“it’s our fault, our most grievous fault”; or, “deepest apologies”) . . .

And finally, the appeal: Along with your stories, essays, and poems, please submit to our new miCRo category, a weekly online flash feature (curated by our assistant and associate editors) that will debut in September. Once a week, we’ll feature a mini-story, essay, or poem on our website. For the sake of those reading on a screen, we’re keeping this short: Each accepted piece will be less than 500 words (for prose or hybrid pieces) or less than 32 lines (for poetry). Send us up to three pieces in each submission. (And, an added bonus: even if you have work under consideration for the print journal, you can still send in a miCRo submission.)