Publish in Essais

Essais—UVU’s premier student journal for scholarly analysis of cultural texts—is currently accepting submissions for its Spring 2024 issue. We invite critical and theoretical essays on literature, film, music, religious texts, new media, sociopolitical topics, and other cultural artifacts. Recent issues of Essais have published student work on topics such as postcolonial feminism and literature, socioeconomic investigations of contemporary film, philosophical approaches to rock music, queer theory readings of familial dynamics, and examinations of contemporary African American art and poetry. Most papers written for upper-division literature, rhetoric, and pedagogy courses will be considered for publication, especially those that engage any of these topics through a theoretical lens and/or with a scholarly framework. As they are assessing student writing at the end of the semester, we ask instructors in the Department of English and Literature to encourage their best students to submit their work. Students may also revise and resubmit essays that were not accepted for publication in a previous issue.

A publication in Essais will look great on any professional résumé or academic curriculum vitae. The journal invites current UVU students to submit academic essays that rigorously engage literature, film, and other cultural artifacts as well as rhetoric and critical/literary theory. (Students may also submit up to one semester after graduation.) Submissions are chosen for publication by a panel of student editors in a double-blind selection process. Selected essays will be considered for publication pending a revision process in which editors work with authors to polish their piece.

Recommendations: Consider submitting an essay that received a good grade in a previous course. Such papers are great foundations for Essais publications. Remember that you can expand and/or develop a paper prior to submitting with the help of an instructor or mentor.

Requirements: 8-15 pages (double spaced), MLA formatting and Works Cited page, must cite outside sources.

Responsibilities: Authors whose papers are accepted commit to completing extensive revisions on their paper, as well as participating in editorial workshops with faculty advisors and student staff.

Essay Submission Instructions

Fall 2024 Essay Submission Deadline: September 09, 2024

1. Keep the title of your submission, but remove any other identifying information—your name (first page and all headers), instructor’s name, course number, etc.—from the body of the essay.

2. Save your file in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format. Using other file formats may result in your submission not being accessible to the editors.

3. Email your submission as an attachment to essais.submissions@gmail.com. In the body of the email, tell us the course/semester for which the essay was written, and include a brief summary (~100 words) of the essay’s content.

Artwork Submissions

All of the student essays we publish are accompanied by single-page art pieces, also submitted by UVU students. In the past, we have published a mix of photographs, paintings, and drawings, in both black & white and color, spanning a broad variety of styles. For examples of artwork we have previously selected for publication, click here.

Our Spring 2024 deadline for student art submissions is November 5th, 2024. To submit, send an image of your artwork in .jpg, .png, or .tif format, preferably in the highest resolution/DPI you have available, to essais.submissions@gmail.com.