Open Verdict is Now Accepting Submissions – Here Is What We Are Looking For

A poem about forgetting and a neuroscience paper about memory are asking the same question. They just speak different languages.

For too long those two languages have lived in separate rooms – the scientist in one, the artist in another, both circling the same truths about what it means to be human without ever quite meeting in the middle. Open Verdict exists because we think that separation is a mistake. And we are done with it.

Starting today, Mind on Trial's literary journal is open for submissions.

What Open Verdict Is

Open Verdict is a literary journal that publishes student writing, poetry, and art exploring the human experience of mind, memory, behavior, and justice. It is open to students from any school, anywhere. You do not need a science background. You do not need to know anything about the law. You just need something to say about what it means to think, to feel, to choose, to forget, to be held responsible – or to hold someone else responsible.

Here is what makes Open Verdict different from every other student literary journal: each accepted piece can optionally be paired with a short neuroscience interpretation – 150 to 250 words written by our editorial team – that connects the themes of your creative work to a real scientific concept.

What does that look like in practice? A poem about a memory you cannot quite hold onto might be paired with a short explanation of how memory consolidation actually works – and why our memories are reconstructions, not recordings. A story about a character making a terrible decision under pressure might be paired with an explanation of how stress affects the prefrontal cortex. Your creative piece stands completely on its own. The pairing simply adds a layer for readers who want to go deeper.

You can opt in or opt out. The choice is yours.

What We Are Looking For

Open Verdict publishes work that touches on any of these themes:

Memory and Forgetting – because neuroscience tells us that memory is not a recording, it is a reconstruction. And that changes everything.

Identity and the Self – because who you are is also a question about what your brain does and does not control.

Perception and Reality – because what you see, hear, and remember is filtered through a brain that is always interpreting, never just recording.

Behavior and Choice – because the line between a decision and a compulsion is not always where we think it is.

Mental Illness and Human Experience – because the lived experience of mental illness is something science alone cannot fully capture – but art can.

Justice and Responsibility – because who we hold accountable, and how, says everything about what we believe about the human mind.

If your piece fits more than one of these themes, even better.

A Note From the Founder

I built Open Verdict because I kept noticing the same gap.

In science classes we talk about the brain in terms of regions and functions and firing patterns. In English classes we talk about memory and identity and the weight of a single decision. Nobody ever puts those two conversations in the same room. But they are the same conversation. They are just using different words.

I am a student who wants to be a forensic psychiatrist. I spend a lot of time thinking about why people do what they do – what the brain was doing in the moment a decision was made, what the law says about it afterward, and what justice actually looks like when you understand both. I started Mind on Trial because I believed those questions deserved a serious, student-led space.

Open Verdict is the part of that space for people who process those questions through creativity rather than case analysis. Both approaches are rigorous. Both approaches are valid. And honestly – the best thinking I have ever encountered lives right at the border between the two.

If you have been sitting on a piece of writing that feels too strange, too personal, or too hard to categorize anywhere else – this might be exactly where it belongs.

How to Submit

Open Verdict accepts essays, poetry, fiction, and artwork from students at any school.

• Prose and essays: up to 1,500 words

• Poetry: any length, any form

• Artwork: submitted as a high resolution image file

• Who can submit: any student, any school, any grade

• Response time: we aim to respond within 3 to 4 weeks

• The neuroscience pairing: optional – just let us know if you would like one

Submit using the form on our website at mindontrial.org

Closing:

The questions Mind on Trial asks – about the brain, about behavior, about justice – do not have easy answers. That is still the point. But some of the most honest answers I have ever encountered did not come from a research paper. They came from a poem. They came from a story. They came from a piece of art that said the thing science has not yet found the language for.

That is what Open Verdict is here for.

We cannot wait to read what you send us.