CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
POETRY + ESSAYS + STORIES + DIGITAL ART + CREATIVE NON-FICTION + PHOTOGRAPHS
Special Edition: CATHARSIS
Guest editors NADIA ALEXIS and T.J. BENSON invite you to reflect on the theme of Catharsis (defined as release) as a fitting epilogue to an extremely tumultuous year. We are accepting previously unpublished poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and art/photography that imagine our place as Black People in this (re)alignment, or chart new paths for our future. We aim for a collection that blends writing by Africans, African-Americans, Black Caribbeans, and other members of the African diaspora. We are interested in the personal but also the political. We want literature that delights, inspires, conspires, validates, repudiates. We are interested in capturing the myriad voices and perspectives that continue to shape the increasingly complex identity of the Black person as they inhabit spaces across the globe.
- Poetry: please send us up to three poems (no more than three pages per poem).
- Fiction: one piece, no more than 2500 words.
- Creative nonfiction/personal essay: one piece, no more than 2500 words.
- Art/photography: up to two pieces (at least 300 dpi).
Deadline: October 31
Launch date: January 1, 2021
Send to: write@africanwriter.com
NOTE:
(Subject line heading: “Special Issue + Genre.” For example, “Special Issue: Poetry”)
Please include your bio (and if you wish, attach your photo and social media name)
GUEST EDITORS
Nadia Alexis is a poet and photographer who was born in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Kweli Journal, Mud Season Review, MQR: Mixtape, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and others. Her photography has been published in fields magazine, MQR: Mixtape, TORCH Journal,and the MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora anthology. She is a 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography nominee, a semifinalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a 2019 recipient of the honorable mention prize in poetry for the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Award for College Writers, and she has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole. Her photographs have been exhibited in Cuba and the U.S. She is currently a creative writing doctoral student at the University of Mississippi.
T.J. Benson is a Nigerian writer and visual artist whose work explores the body in the context of memory, migration, utopia and the unconscious self. His work has been exhibited and published in several journals like Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Saraba, Jalada Africa, SSDA Migrations, Catapult, Bakwa Magazine and shortlisted for awards like the Saraba Manuscript Prize for his collection of short stories We Won’t Fade into Darkness. The collection was published by Parresia in 2018 and his debut novel The Madhouse will be published in February 2021 by Penguin Random House, SA. He served as a contract editor for literary magazines and publishing houses in Nigeria and has facilitated writing workshops for four years. He currently lives in an apartment full of plants and is in the danger of becoming a cat person.