Call for Entries: Flash 405, April 2025: “Quitting”

Exposition Review

Spring is in full swing, and that means it’s almost time for April Flash 405!

Our 405-themed contest has historically opened the fourth day of each contest month, closing on the fifth of the following month. However, in the spirit of this round’s theme, we’re “quitting” our typical schedule and opening early! We will start accepting submissions on March 27, the same day as our our tenth-anniversary celebration at AWP Los Angeles!

The celebration will also feature readings by several previous Flash 405 winners.

Want to attend? If you’re in Los Angeles and/or attending AWP, our event at Truly LA is free!

Want to be featured in an Expo reading? Submit! Winners receive publication, a cash prize, and the opportunity to be featured in future Expo community events.

Keep reading to learn about how to submit, the contest theme, and the judge, Expo Associate Nonfiction Editor Francesca Spiegel.

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What’s Your Expo Story?: Sofía Aguilar Edition

Kiana Perez Granados

As a nod to our upcoming ten-year anniversary, what better way to celebrate the occasion than to share the journeys of contributors, editors, readers, and interns at Exposition Review? Within this blog series, folks from our Expo Fam have been invited to share how they got involved with the journal, as well as how it has influenced their work.

We view this series as a time capsule for the impact and growth that has taken place at Expo. We hope their personal reflections can inspire others to read, write, and learn more about what our journal has to offer.

We are excited to begin our series with a rockstar of a young writer and editor, Sofía Aguilar. Today, she continues to be involved with writing as she looks forward to the debut of her children’s picture book, Queer Latine Heroes. However, let’s take a look at how she got involved with Expo.

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“POP!” Literary Prize Nominations

Exposition Review

At Exposition Review, our mission is to continue to create opportunities for our ever-growing community of talented writers and artists to share their voices and grow their platforms. This is why every year we submit some of our strongest published work for a variety of prestigious literary awards and anthologies. We are proud to present our nominees from our “POP!” issue for the following awards:
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Call for Entries: Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor”

Exposition Review

As our editors are hard at work putting together our “Spring” annual issue, we are also springing into 2025 with our first Flash 405 contest of the year!

From February 4 to March 5, we are accepting entries on the theme “Anchor,” chosen by judge and Expo Associate Editor Ashley Moon. Ashley is not new to Flash 405, having curated Composition: Reach, our second chapbook comprised of previous Flash 405 winners! We are thrilled to have her now take on the mantle of judge for our February contest.

Learn more about Ashley and this round of Flash 405:

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Flash 405, August 2024: “Otherworldly” Winners

Exposition Review

We are pleased to finally share the winners of “Otherworldly,” our August 2024 Flash 405 contest. With this announcement, our Flash 405 2024 season officially come to a close, but we are ending an incredibly strong note! Overall the submission quality for this contest was very high, and there were no easy decisions for our guest judge Dr. Cecilia Caballero! In the end, though, decisions were made, and our winners and honorable mentions truly encapsulate the call for stories that contain “something a bit strange about otherworldly ways we survive the every day.” We hope you enjoy these five stories as much as we do.

Congratulations to our winners! Their work can be read below.

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Expo Recommends: “Spring”

Exposition Review

ExpoRecommends_What-should-I-read-next

What should I read next? It’s a question we all ask ourselves time and again. Even with the countless stories, poems, essays, scripts, art, comics, and films to discover, to fall in love with or to detest, it can be a challenge to choose. Enter Expo Recommends, a curated selection of readings brought to you by the editors of Exposition Review.

Meanwhile, Expo is in the midst of our 2025 annual issue submission season. For Vol. X, our editors chose the theme “Spring,” seeking stories that well from the imagination, language that leaps off the page, writing that’s liberated from the constraints of genre and crackles with the energy of a spring storm.

Heading into the second half of our submission season (our deadline is December 15), we want to give you—our readers, writers, submitters, and community—an extra dose of inspiration. So whether you read Expo Recommends for the recommendations or a behind-the-scenes look into the preferences of our editorial team, we hope you’ll enjoy our “Spring”-inspired Expo Recommends. And when you buy your copies of the books from our Bookshop, Exposition Review gets a cut!

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Flash 405, June 2024: “Persona” Winners

Exposition Review

When Expo Associate Editor Madeline Grimm posed the theme “Persona” for our June 2024 Flash 405 contest, we were excited to see what stories it would inspire. This versatile theme encompasses explorations of  “shifting identities and self-fashioning,” but Madeline also asked writers to confront our own personas—how we as writers create “a range of literary alter egos that tell [our] stories.”

The entries we received did not disappoint, pushing the theme beyond our expectations, and after much deliberation, we are excited to share the results with the world.

Congratulations to our winners! Their work can be read below.

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Call for Submissions for Vol. X: “Spring”

Exposition Review8 Comments

A Venus flytrap. Overlaid text reads: "Exposition Review Vol. X 'Spring' Call for Submissions."

Exposition Review is happy to announce the theme for our tenth annual issue: “Spring.”

Submissions will be open September 15–December 15*, 2024. We accept work in all forms: fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, poetry, scripts for stage & screen, experimental narratives, visual art, film, and comics.

*Submissions have been extended through December 31, 2024, for Nonfiction, Experimental, Visual Art, Comics, and Film.

Read more about the theme and how to submit:

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