Do you want to write for Café?
Café — Stirring the Spirit Within, is a free, monthly on-line publication magazine for young women. It is developed by Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Chicago, Illinois).

Our audience 
The target audience is Lutheran women between the ages of 18 to 35+. Our readers vary in age. They are career women, students, mothers, volunteers, those active in the Women of the ELCA and those not, single, married, divorced, widowed, liberal, conservative, and moderate. Our readership is a diverse group with a variety of lifestyles and interests.

Submitting your work
Queries with a sample of your work are preferred. Queries may be submitted via e-mail to cafe@elca.org. We prefer to see your sample as an attachment in MS Word, but in-message samples will be accepted. Please let us know in your query if this work is being considered for publication elsewhere.

Queries about time-sensitive topics should be submitted at least seven months in advance (for example, a query about a Christmas article should be submitted in May.)

Cafe receives many queries and unsolicited manuscripts; because of this volume, we cannot acknowledge them when they are received. We will contact you if we are interested in your work.

Please know that most of what we publish is assigned — we ask particular established authors to write on specific themes far in advance of publication. We publish very few articles that originated as unsolicited manuscripts or queries. Those we do accept meet our requirements, as outlined below.

Requirements
Queries most likely to be accepted are from Christian women. (Though we accept queries from men.) include stories about women or reflections that especially speak to young women.

Developing your article
Once we have contacted you about your query and asked you to develop your article, please follow these guidelines.

Inclusive language is important. For example, the pronoun he should not be used to refer to both males and females. Generally, avoid using pronouns (he, she, his, her) when referring to God, and words for God that are exclusively masculine should be used only rarely (for example, use ruler, not king).

Carefully research your article, checking the accuracy of facts, quotations, names, addresses, and Web site addresses.
When quoting Scripture, indicate which translation you are using. Cafe prefers the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). Do not depend on memory even when quoting your favorite Bible verse.

We must have full publication information (author, title, page number of quoted text; place of publication, publisher, and date of publication) for any books, articles, or hymn texts cited. We discourage the use of footnotes; please use in-text citations.

Rights
Café usually purchases one-time, first rights; we prefer to print original articles that have not been published elsewhere. Copyright remains with author.

Second rights (when the work has been previously published) are purchased only rarely. If you are offering second rights, please give the name and date of the publication in which the work first appeared.

Please send freelance submissions electronically to:
cafe@elca.org