Creative Nonfiction Literary Magazines
I’ve been threatening to create a CNF list for years, and it’s still in the works. In the meantime, it appears a CNF list would be mostly comparable to my (much larger) fiction one, with a few exceptions. The following magazines only accept nonfiction submissions:
Orion
River Teeth (and Beautiful Things)
New York Times—Modern Love
New York Times Magazine
This American Life
The Christian Science Monitor—The Home Forum
Vox—First Person
Boston Globe—Connections
Boston Globe—Ideas
The Believer
American Scholar
Fourth Genre
The Point
Creative Nonfiction
Brevity
Commentary
Bitch
Bustle
Mother Jones
Vice
Notre Dame Magazine
Hippocampus
The Bold Italic
Pulp
Dame Magazine
Mask
The Smart Set
Motherwell
Narratively
Kveller
New Statesman
Atavist
The following magazines publish both genres, but they tend to have much higher prize scores in nonfiction than fiction:
The Sun
Southwest Review
New Letters
Salmagundi
The Normal School
Harvard Review
North American Review
Slate
Either way, you'd do well to publish an essay in any magazine with a high ranking for fiction, because those places are usually very respected as well. Good luck!