Creative writing from the people between worlds.
now taking submissions
Tembisa is the creative writing section of The Nurubian. Fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, essay in the literary register. The name means promise. We take that seriously.
Writing published here carries the weight of the institution. So does the writing we decline.
What we publish
Work that sits in settled intellectual register. You know your lens. You are refining it, not discovering it. You have read widely enough that your sentences carry other sentences inside them without naming them.
We are drawn to:
Work that treats cultural liminality as a condition to be written from, not a subject to be explained. Writing that assumes the reader. Prose and verse that can hold contradiction without collapsing it into resolution. Pieces that earn their ending.
What we don't publish
Work still figuring out what it thinks. Writing that performs its intellectualism rather than embodying it. Political advocacy, regardless of position. Pieces whose primary function is to process private grievance. Writing generated or substantially assisted by AI. Work that reads as a first draft of a feeling.
Criteria
Your piece should:
Be between 800 and 4,000 words for prose. Poetry submissions may contain up to five poems in a single document.
Be previously unpublished, including on personal blogs, Substack, Medium, and social media.
Carry a clear point of view that does not require the reader to be briefed before entering the work.
Stand without the biographical context of the writer. If the work requires us to know who you are to appreciate it, it is not ready.
How submissions are read
Each submission is read by an Editor and at least one other reader. We do not respond with line edits or developmental notes. We respond in one of two ways: the work will appear in The Nurubian, or it will not. Silence past six weeks means the latter.
Writers whose work is accepted once are invited to submit again without going through the open pool.
Submission