Submissions

Who:

The editorial board welcomes submissions from students, staff, and faculty of the UW-Madison health sciences community (including UW Health, School of Medicine and Public Health, School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy, School of Veterinary Medicine, University Health Services, related health programs on campus such as Occupational Therapy and Kinesiology, among others, as well as other departments conducting research into the health sciences).
Pieces may have co-collaborators; at least one of the collaborators must be affiliated with the campus health sciences community. The person who is affiliated should be the one to begin the submission form.
Please note Corpus Callosum aims to publish a wide variety of voices from our community and is especially keen to publish work by artists not yet published in Corpus Callosum. Therefore, we will be taking into consideration if artists/authors have been published before or not in final decisions.

How & When:

Submissions for the Spring 2024 issue are now closed.

  • Please check back for the published issue.

What:

Artists may submit one entry per issue, regardless of if submitting as solo artist or as a collaborator.

Please note that all submissions will be blind reviewed, so please do NOT put the artist/author name on the document(s) and filenames being submitted. In the form there is a place for the author/artist name.
If this is not followed, the managing editor will ask you to re-submit with the identifying info removed.

Writings:

  • Original writings only. No copies or AI-generated art.*
  • 1 piece of prose or 1 poem permitted only; please do not submit multiple pieces in a single document/file; exceptions may be made if the pieces are connected and are not considered to stand alone (they must be together).
  • Essays/non-fiction and short stories no more than 2500 words, flash fiction no more than 500 words, and poems no more than 1000 words.
  • Submissions should be checked for spelling and grammar, double-spaced, and 12 pt font. Pieces will not be edited.
  • File type accepted: doc, no larger than 24MB.

Visual art:

  • Original art only. No copies, photographs of other artists’ work, or AI-generated art.*
  • Digital 2D art or well photographed 2D and 3D art. This means good lighting, no distracting backgrounds.
  • 1 visual art entry permitted only; please do not submit multiple pieces in a single document/file; exceptions may be made if the pieces are connected, like a diptych or a set, and the pieces are not considered to stand alone (they must be together).
  • Must be at least 1200px on the longest side and 300 dpi.
  • File types accepted: jpg, png, no larger than 24MB.

Multimedia:

  • Original audio and video only. No covers, copies, or AI-generated art.*
  • 1 multimedia entry permitted only; please do not submit multiple pieces in a single document/file; exceptions may be made if the pieces are connected and are not considered to stand alone (they must be together).
  • File types accepted: mp3, m4a, ogg, wav, mp4, m4v (MPEG-4), mov, wmv, avi, mpg, 3gp (3GPP), no larger than 24MB.

Please note the following:

  • All authors and artists whose work may discuss or reference patients or patient care must follow and comply with HIPAA before submitting. For those submitting who are affiliated with UW-Madison, you may contact the Office of Compliance if there are doubts or concerns about being HIPAA-compliant. For those not affiliated with UW-Madison, please contact your institution’s HIPAA compliance office.
  • No simultaneous or previously published submissions accepted.
  • Submission is not a guarantee of publication. All content will be reviewed by the board prior to publishing. The board reserves the right to accept or reject submissions at their discretion and/or to remove content from the publication at any time.

*Corpus Callosum will not accept AI-generated art for the complexity of issues and concerns/questions it raises that have not yet been answered:

  • First, since AI-generated art is created from datasets of work by other artists, writers, and creators, often without credit/attribution/payment/the creators’ knowledge and consent, it is not clear whether AI-generated art is in fact original art, which is specified in our submission guidelines.
  • Second, with the question of originality comes the question of who the actual artist of an AI-generated piece is (the artist is the human entering the prompt, the software interpreting the prompt and creating the work, or the artists from whose work the software is taking data), which also isn’t clear.
  • Third, as of right now, AI-generated work cannot obtain copyright in the U.S. the way human-created content can, which has implications for us as a publication and who/what owns copyright of the work or if they do at all.

While we understand AI can be a great tool and resource in many fields, in the world of art it is not clear if it is or not. Thus, we will wait to see how societies, governments, and the courts iron out these often thorny, ethical, and highly complex issues and we may change our submission guidelines in the future based on how things change. Until that time, however, Corpus Callosum will not accept AI-generated work. Thank you for your understanding.