Guidelines for Submissions

Spring Deadline: 11:59 pm. Monday, February 14, 2022

The Collage staff is accepting submissions of original, creative works by MTSU students and recent alumni.

What Kind of Work is Accepted? 

We accept prose, poetry, song lyrics, short plays, design, art, photography, videos, and audios. 

If you have interests in multiple mediums, then you will be happy to know that you can submit to and potentially be published in all of our categories: Visual, Literary, Audio, and Video.

How Are the Selections Made?

The Collage staff engages in a blind review process where submissions are graded on criteria such as originality, artistic merit, impace, use of language, visual imagery, and creative expression. Final selections are made at the discretion of the Collage staff through criteria that has been established as appropriate to showcase MTSU, the Honors College, and our diverse community.

If a submission is accepted, we will contact you by email at the end of the semester to the email address listed in your submission information.

Before You Submit, Please Carefully Note the Following:

1. You can only submit FOUR (4) entries per major category (visual, literary, audio, and video)

2. Don't identify yourself on either the copy of the submitted work or on the digital file. We want to maintain integrity by leaving off all submitter names as well as having a double-blind grading process.

3. Submitting your work gives Collage permission to publish submitted work in the printed magazine, the online publication, and the MTSU institutional repository. 

4. Submitting your work gives Collage permission to edit submitted work. We will not alter your content or artistic intention. For literary submissions, we maintain the right to  alter spelling, punctuation, and grammar as needed, while always respecting any intentionally-unique spacing and formatting. For visual art, we may offer to reshoot the image, if the quality is low. We will never make edits to submissions under the categories of Art, Photography, Audio, or Video. We will, of course, contact you about changes to intentional content before making alterations.

5. Having your work published in Collage does not relinquish or weaken your copyright to your work in any way. If anything, it functions to establish your intellectual property as your own. You do not need to have your work legally copyrighted before submitting. You will retain all rights, and are granting us permission to print your work.

6. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

7. The "We Exist to Promote You" section of the digital submission form is geared toward promoting students and is optional.  Type N/A if you would prefer not to fill out this portion.
 

If you would like to personally submit your work, feel free to stop by the Collage office on the second floor of the Martin Honors Building (Room 224) or our Advisor Marsha Powers’ office (Room 225) to drop off a USB drive or visual submission. USB drives will be returned immediately while visual submissions may be kept longer for potential re-photographing, unless otherwise requested.

Collage Editor
MTSU Box 267
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

Questions?

Contact Marsha Powers, the Collage adviser by calling 615-898-5759 or emailing marsha.powers@mtsu.edu. You can also get in touch with the Collage Editor in Chief at collage@mtsu.edu.