Fall 2025 Issue Published October 19, 2025
by Barbara Westwood Diehl
We hope that you enjoy the poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction—along with a special micro section—by the following writers in our fall 2025 issue, published on October 19, 2025.
Mikki Aronoff
Allison Field Bell
Brett Biebel
Nina Boutsikaris
Mike Bove
Jiordan Castle
Ron Dionne
Dana Brewer Harris
Audra Huang
Abbie Kiefer
Rebecca Klassen
Veronica Kornberg
Helen Meneilly
Megan Nichols
Christopher Notarnicola
Per Olvmyr
Matt Poindexter
Z. Yasmin Waheed
Claire Wyatt
Allison Zhang
As a regular reader and writer of micro-length work myself, I especially enjoyed seeing what hundreds of writers created with this 400-word limit. In meetings with other BR editors, we noted how some had fantastical elements, and some were simple, direct, entirely realistic. Some told stories with complete narrative arcs; some were glimpses into a world or anecdotes; some were portraits. Some were abstract; some were filled with imagery. Some were perfectly comfortable being well under the 400-word limit. Some begged to be much longer works. Since these didn’t need to be shelved into a category (as submissions are for our contests), we sometimes talked about how we’d define them, how the language in this one made it a prose poem, or how that one sure sounded like creative nonfiction.
In the end, though, we read all of them as simply micros. Small boxes of compressed language and emotion like jack-in-the-box toys ready to spring a surprise on us. We always wanted to be surprised by something in the micro—a freshness in the subject or language or both. I’m so glad that we were able to include this special category. And, of course, we always welcome micro-length works in all our categories.
A huge thanks to everyone who made this issue possible.
And thank you for being a Baltimore Review reader!
Writers: Our Submittable doors, for contest and non-contest submissions, are open until November 30, 2025. See our submission guidelines for each of these categories. No submission fee, ever, for non-contest submissions—but we’ll send you a big doc with 65 writing prompts and a bunch of tips if you donate $5. Contest fee is a modest $8 (and we’ll send you the writing prompts doc if you ask for it—prompts are helpful sometimes, right?). The final judge for the contest is Mandy Moe Pwint Tu. We look forward to reading your work.