Regnum Umbrae: Submissions Are Open

Bruja Magazine invites artists, writers, photographers, and creators into the Realm of Shadows.

August 16, 2026 | Announcements

This November, Bruja Magazine returns to the darker half of the year with Regnum Umbrae, our Autumn 2026 print issue exploring descent, transformation, memory, and the unseen.

Regnum Umbrae translates loosely to “Realm of Shadows.” It is a symbolic landscape rather than a celebration of darkness for darkness's sake. This issue looks toward the hidden spaces we encounter during periods of change: grief and surrender, memory and intuition, endings that become beginnings, and the parts of ourselves that often emerge only when everything familiar has fallen quiet.

Autumn gives us an appropriate landscape for this exploration. The natural world begins withdrawing. Leaves fall, gardens decay, daylight retreats, and what flourished visibly during summer begins returning to the earth. There is loss in this season, but there is also preparation. Decomposition becomes nourishment. Seeds disappear underground. Life continues in forms we cannot always see.

Submissions for Regnum Umbrae are now open.

What We Are Looking For

We are seeking original work that approaches shadow with curiosity rather than cliché. Darkness can be frightening, beautiful, ancestral, psychological, intimate, spiritual, or deeply ordinary. We are particularly interested in work that understands transformation as complicated: the kind that asks us to relinquish something before we know what will replace it.

Themes may include shadow work and personal transformation, death and rebirth, grief, remembrance, ancestral connection, liminal spaces, dreams, intuition, the subconscious, decay, impermanence, feminine darkness, hidden identities, mourning, release, folklore, underworld imagery, solitude, spiritual descent, and seasonal transition.

These themes are intended as invitations rather than restrictions. If your work speaks to the larger world of Regnum Umbrae in an unexpected way, we want to see it.

Art, Photography & Fashion

We welcome photography, fine art, illustration, mixed media, collage, sculpture, fashion editorials, self-portraiture, conceptual work, and other visual forms.

We are particularly drawn to work with a strong visual identity. Regnum Umbrae can hold the cinematic and surreal alongside the raw and documentary. Shadow does not require everything to be black. We are interested in the many ways artists interpret darkness, memory, mortality, transformation, and the transition between worlds.

The issue's visual palette moves through deep burgundy, black plum, bone, smoke gray, midnight blue, forest shadow, dried rose, rust, ash, and candlelight gold, but submissions do not need to adhere strictly to these colors.

Writing & Poetry

We welcome poetry, personal essays, cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, short-form literary work, and stories that belong within the world of Regnum Umbrae.

We are interested in writing with a point of view. Tell us something we have not considered. Take us somewhere uncomfortable. Examine an inherited belief, an old ritual, a family silence, a strange memory, an ending, a haunting, or a transformation that did not look beautiful while you were living through it.

We want work that feels lived rather than manufactured to fit a theme.

Ritual, Spirituality & Folk Knowledge

Bruja has always been interested in the places where spirituality intersects with culture, history, art, domestic life, and lived experience. For Regnum Umbrae, we welcome thoughtful explorations of ancestral practices, seasonal rituals, mourning traditions, folklore, folk magic, divination, dreams, spiritual descent, death customs, remembrance, and relationships with the unseen.

We especially welcome work rooted in genuine cultural or personal experience. When writing about traditions outside your own experience, we expect care, research, and appropriate acknowledgment of their origins.

Mystery does not require us to abandon context.

The Realm of Shadows

There is a temptation to think of transformation only in terms of what emerges afterward. We celebrate the person who survived, healed, rebuilt, awakened, or became something new.

Regnum Umbrae is interested in what happens before that.

The uncertain middle.

The moment after something has ended but before its meaning becomes clear. The memory that refuses to disappear. The family story nobody tells correctly. The version of ourselves we had to bury. The things our ancestors left behind intentionally and the things they never had the opportunity to explain.

There is knowledge in these places.

There is art there too.

This autumn, we are inviting you to enter them with us.

Regnum Umbrae — Descent & Transformation will be released November 1, 2026, as a print and digital issue of Bruja Magazine.

Submission Deadline: October 1, 2026

Welcome to the Realm of Shadows.