Interview with Bayou Magazine, 2025
Sheena Holt is a student Managing Editor of Bayou Magazine, published by the University of New Orleans. Bayou Magazine is an annual literary magazine, accepting poetry, fiction, and fine art images. In partnership with TWFest, they publish the winner of our One-Act Play Contest. 
Bayou’s mission is to present exceptional, original writing by both established and emerging writers. Writing that first appeared in Bayou Magazine has gone on to be published in many other collections, and their authors’ work has been nominated for or won a host of international poetry, story, and book awards.
Thank you to Sheena for talking with us and telling us more about the magazine.
What is the history of your magazine?
We were founded in 2002 in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. While we currently publish fiction, poetry, and of course, the one-act play winner, we have also published nonfiction in the past.
What is your submission period?
Our submissions are open from September 15 – December 15.
What sort of submissions are you looking for?
We don’t have a particular style we look for, other than high-quality work. We’re open to more experimental pieces as well as more traditional works. If it’s moving, and well, good, we’re interested.
Tell us about the one-act play partnership.
We love working on the one-act play! Once we receive the play, we read it through and compare it to similarly structured works to decide how it would best appear for publication. The current winner, for instance, included rap lyrics, so we consulted with some playwrights on how to best format the lyrics for publication. After that, it’s a matter of trial and error to best format the play on our website, or in the past, in our physical issue.
What do you look forward to seeing in the play(s) the magazine publishes?
I look forward to seeing plays that play with different media forms (like “Spit” did with rap). I also have a real love for dialogue as a fiction writer, so reading through great play scripts is wonderful inspiration for my own writing and for our fiction team.
Tell us a little bit about you!
I’m an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of New Orleans, and I currently serve as one of two managing editors for Bayou Magazine. Before coming into this role, I was a managing editor for a few digital magazines that specialized in dating and lifestyle coverage.
Explore more from Bayou Magazine HERE.
