Submissions  Thank you for your interest in Hurm Editions by Michael Workman Studio and Bridge Books, the book-publishing division of Chicago's independent, intersectional art and culture journal. 

Hurm Editions is currently seeking cutting edge SMUT

Hurm Editions announces a call for the best in poetry and fiction for an upcoming anthology volume of literary erotica. For SMUT, we seek to fulfill the promise of the word: stories, pictures or comments about sex that deal with it in a way that some people find offensive, while having as much fun as possible. 

We look to precursors such as the anthologies of Susie Bright, and volumes that sought to expand the literary erotic including Zadie Smith's "piece of flesh,' Mary Christmas & Audacia Ray's $pread magazine articles, Sophie Calle's "Exquisite Pain," or Anaïs Nin classic erotic story collections such as "Seduction of the Minotaur and "Little Birds," or Georges Bataille's "Blue of Noon." 

Please include in your cover letter, c.v., previous book publications (if any), which press you are submitting for, the title of your submission, year and any other information, including a short bio.   

All book-length fiction and poetry submissions must include a completed manuscript. Nonfiction and scholarly submissions should include a proposal abstract, chapter list, and sample intro / first chapter with their submission, as well as a list of other current relevant titles in the specific field of interest. If the proposed title is a book in translation, please also include what countries the title has appeared in previously, as well as name and contact information for first appearance publisher. 

Please refer to our submissions guidelines before submitting your work. We DO NOT accept simultaneous submissions for our books submissions, exclusive submissions ONLY are allowed for this category. You can withdraw or edit your submission at anytime by logging into your account. To learn more about Bridge and our mission as a periodical, please refer to our About Us page.

Hurm Editions is also currently accepting stories, poetry and completed comic feature-length formats including: 

• Graphic Novels  
• Poetry
• Journal Entries
• Transgressive literary and pulp / genre fiction

These categories are currently closed for submission, but please feel free to query any proposed submission at bridge.editors1@gmail.com. 

An independent publisher founded in 2023 as a press to release artist’s editions from Michael Workman Studio, including his graphic novel Biography of a Villain, due out in 2024, Hurm Editions also seeks to fill a void in the current international publishing landscape. In a culture increasingly sanitized by the infringements on art of corporate norms as community standards, that helps fosters a culture of mass shootings by refusing to depict the aftermaths of our national obsession with gun violence, and that claims to celebrate sexual identity while outlawing any depictions whatsoever of sex or eroticism, Hurm Editions seeks to support work that challenges convention, pushes boundaries, and that revels in the grotesque, incoherent, offensive and obscene.

While many independent presses and publishers of transgressive literature have faded from view in recent years, or otherwise gone out of business, Hurm Editions recognizes that much original, intelligent, genre-busting and groundbreaking new work goes unpublished and unnoticed. We will publish original titles in literary fiction and graphic novels, poetry, occult and witchcraft, nonfiction, erotica, memoir, and the unclassifiable. As well, we seek essays, scholarship and writing that expands and works to preserve underrepresented histories and voices, including crip lit, LGBTQIA, Black arts, writing by sex workers, and the incarcerated, and that explore taboos in drug use and addiction, sex and pornography, violence (societal and otherwise), and other controversial subject matter that would otherwise be deemed illicit and unsupportable, often because of its implicit critique of societal norms. We seek to give voice to the poor, the disenfranchised, the disabled, outcast and delinquent, and some of our favorite writers (whose work would likely otherwise slip through the cracks today) include such critical voices as: Georges Bataille, John Rechy, Hubert Selby, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Anaïs Nin, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Maquis de Sade, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Dennis Cooper, Jean Genet, J.G. Ballard, and Fyodor Doestoevsky.

Hurm Editions is currently building its mailing list, which you can join by singing up here. All new publication announcements and calls for submissions will be announced through this mailing list. Currently, we do not accept open submissions but feel free to query your work by emailing us here.