Literary Magazine: Breaking Ground

Isabelle Galatro Depth in the Alley

The staff of Breaking Ground encourage students, faculty, and staff to participate in the upcoming edition of Breaking Ground. This issue, Breaking Ground is going themeless! So give us your best work. Express yourself through fiction, poetry, non-fiction, art, photography, or graphics.

Breaking Ground: The SUNY Broome Literary Magazine is seeking submissions for its Spring 2026 issue . Open to All SUNY Broome Students, Faculty, Administrators, Staff, and Alumni

To be considered for publication in the Spring 2026 issue of Breaking Ground all submissions must be complete and received between September 1, 2025, and March 27, 2026

Please read specific guidelines for how and what to submit, below.

Submit your entries for the Spring 2026 issue of Breaking Ground!

Send us your best original poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, memoirs, artwork, photography, or graphic stories for our annual theme issue. As with past issues the only criteria are vividness, vitality, depth of thought and expression and, above all, excellence.

$100 First Prize and $75 Second Prize for Best Cover Art/Photography
All student submissions will automatically be entered into the cover contest.
All cover entries must be in color and be high resolution images in portrait format (as opposed to landscape format). Winners will be announced at our May 2026 annual reading by contributors.

Submission Guidelines

Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-Fiction

3-5 Poems, 1-2 short stories (fiction) or 1-2 works of creative non-fiction/memoir (10 pages maximum). Typed, 12 point Times New Roman or other simple font; single-spaced for poetry; double-spaced for prose. Submit written work as either a Microsoft Word file, or a Google Docs file. Do not submit writing as a PDF.

Artwork, Photographs, Cartoons, Graphic Stories

3-5 High resolution photographs, drawings, paintings, or other publishable works of art that stand alone on their own merits–as either .jpeg, PhotoShop, or .tif files. Each file cannot exceed 10 MB and the total size of all your submissions cannot exceed 20MB. Be aware of the size and format of the magazine when submitting pictures: portrait format will fill an entire page, whereas landscape format takes up only a half-page. For the front and back cover of the magazine, portrait format is preferred. Note: High resolution artwork and photography must be at least 1 MB or larger.

We suggest you study a previous issue of Breaking Ground to get an idea of what we publish, and to see the format for submissions and Notes on Contributors. Below are the full 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2023 editions of the magazine: