Submissions open until October 1, 2026!

Thinking Ink Press, the publisher of the award-winning The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, wants to publish your short stories, poetry, and art celebrating neurodivergent people exploring other worlds and building bridges that connect them to our own.

Submission deadline: October 1st, 2026

Space and time keep worlds apart – but sometimes the real barriers between worlds are found in how we think. Neurodivergent people frequently find themselves creating bridges between the neurotypical world they live in and the world as their minds experience it.

Could neurodivergent people bridge the gap to alien worlds?

Let’s find out!

We’re looking for that sense of wonder that happens when two worlds collide—and we learn something about each from the impact. But most worlds are too far apart to ever intersect. What you need is a bridge between worlds. The kind of bridge built by neurodivergent minds.

For many neurodivergent folks, they way we think just reflects how our brains work, but the differences from the neurotypical world around us can present challenges or provide strength—and the work we do to bridge those differences should be celebrated as a source of wonder.

We want your stories, poems, and art that celebrate bridging worlds through neurodiversity!

The Neurodiversiverse: Bridging Worlds will be an anthology of 60,000 – 90,000 words, edited by Anthony Francis & Liza Olmsted, featuring stories, poetry, and art with a range of neurodivergent perspectives on building bridges between worlds that are alien to each other. We invite you to put your spin on what that means, or to look to the first volume in the series, The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters for inspiration.

We welcome all stories well told, but we are particularly interested in tales of representation, empowerment, and own voices for neurodivergent people—especially stories which highlight how neurodivergent perspectives and experiences might give advantages when finding common ground between groups with alien cultures.

What we mean by neurodivergence

Anything that makes a mind different from the norm. Most commonly you’ll hear about autism and ADHD, but we’re also interested in PTSD, anxiety, synesthesia, Tourette’s, you name it. We’re especially looking for stories about forms of neurodivergence underrepresented in Alien Encounters, such as schizophrenia, personality disorders, and dissociative identity disorder. And, of course, multiply-neurodivergent characters are welcome as well.

Own voices and diversity

Thinking Ink Press believes that people of all backgrounds deserve to have their voices heard. We focus on books relating to disability, writing advice and inspiration, as well as diverse speculative fiction. Editors Liza Olmsted and Anthony Francis are neurodivergent, and all of the founders of Thinking Ink Press are members of marginalized communities.

For this anthology, we are particularly interested in short stories written by people who are neurodivergent. We understand the impact of intersectionality, and explicitly invite people from other marginalized backgrounds to submit stories.

We’re also aware of how insidious unconscious bias is, and we are making efforts to minimize its effect on what we choose to publish. If you’d like to chat with us about that, please email us at diversity [at] thinkinginkpress [dot] com; we’re open to good advice.

No AI-generated pieces

On the note of “own voices,” we have chosen not to accept human submissions on behalf of AI collaborators. Fully autonomous intelligent systems are, of course, welcome to submit on their own initiative (agentic AI systems churning out stories at the behest of a human author don’t count). However, we won’t accept AI-generated or AI-edited pieces unless you actually are the AI in question.

What we’re looking for (Submission Guidelines)

• Speculative fiction about neurodivergent people building bridges between alien worlds—for whatever that means to you
  • We expect the representation of neurodivergent people to be empowering and hopeful, not caricatured, infantilizing, or demeaning
  • We will reject cure narratives and “aliens caused my neurodivergence”
  • We also will reject stories where the main character is neurotypical. If that’s how your story is framed, consider rewriting it to center the neurodivergent character’s experience.
• Original work (no reprints please), translations OK
• No simultaneous submissions
• Multiple submissions OK
• Short stories up to 15k words, though less than 7k is preferred
• Flash fiction up to 1k words, though we be focusing more on short stories in this anthology
• Poetry up to 200 lines, though less than 100 lines is preferred
• Black-and-white line art illustrations

These guidelines are flexible: if you have a story or illustration that you think is just perfect for this anthology but does not quite fit these guidelines, we’d prefer the opportunity to see it rather than you self-rejecting your piece for us. Please feel free to query if you have any questions!

What we’re paying

We’re paying a flat rate per submission:

• $100 per short story
• $50 per flash fiction story
• $50 per poem
• $50-$100 per illustration, depending on size & complexity

We plan to run a Kickstarter campaign for the anthology so we can pay the authors the SFWA standard rate of 8¢/word for fiction and also pay our artists more. But The Neurodiversiverse: Bridging Worlds will move forward regardless of whether the campaign is funded.

How to submit

The submission deadline is October 1st, 2026.

To give your submission the best possible chance of not being auto-rejected at 4am by an exhausted editor, please follow as many of these instructions as is practical:

• For stories, flash fiction, and poetry:
  • Format your document following the Shunn or SFWA standard manuscript formats
  • Save your document in Word, Open Office, or plain text
  • Name the document as “Author Name – Title of the Story or Poem”
• For art:
  • Save your piece in PNG, Photoshop, or Illustrator format
  • Name the file as “Artist Name – Title of the Piece”
• Write a brief cover letter describing yourself and your piece.
  • If you identify as a member of an underrepresented group, we encourage you to let us know in your cover letter, but this isn’t required.
  • If your submission doesn’t quite meet the guidelines outlined above, please mention in what ways.
• Please use the submission form at this link to submit your piece(s).
  • There will be space to add your cover letter as formattable text.

Note: We want our anthology to be open to everyone. If you need special accommodations for your submission, or if aspects of these guidelines are problematic for you, please email us. We’d be happy to work with you to find an approach that best meets your needs as well as ours.