SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
About Place Journal is an online journal of literary arts published by Black Earth Institute. About Place explores the sense of place and land.
Submissions can include up to 3 poems which do not exceed 50 lines each. Essays, creative nonfiction and other prose should not exceed 4000 words. All submissions must be accompanied by a bio which does not exceed 150 words at the bottom of the submission, and which may include your website.
By submitting you guarantee you hold the rights to the work, and you grant About Place Journal the rights to publish the submitted work. After publication rights revert to the author. Original, previously unpublished work only. Only online submissions accepted.
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ABOUT PLACE AWARD
The About Place Journal and the Black Earth Institute value excellence in art, and art’s capacity to serve the earth and society integrating spirituality, calling forth social justice, and in protecting and healing the earth.
In recognition of these we announce the About Place Award which will be given to the best contribution for each issue. The award for each issue will be directed towards a specified genre: poetry, prose non-fiction, prose fiction, and mixed media. The genre eligible for that issue will be announced in the call for submissions for that issue. The call will include requests for all genres though the award will be limited to those that are in the designated genre.
The About Place Award includes a $250.00 award and a certificate. It will be announced at the time of publication of the particular issue and will be publicized in the issue as well as the Black Earth website and Facebook page.
Fellows and scholars of BEI will determine the recipient of the award from those submissions accepted for that issue. Criteria for the award include both artistic excellence and the expressions of the goals, values and commitments of the Black Earth Institute. For descriptions of these goals, values and commitments see the BEI website,www.blackearthinstitute.org.
We look forward to receiving many submissions in all genres, publishing many quality contributions, and rewarding one of these with the About Place Award.
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THE FUTURE OF WATER
Opens: May 1, 2013 – Closes: August 1, 2013
For this issue, we look for creative work (poems, stories, and essays) that celebrate, document, honor, and mourn the important connections we have with water in its many forms–fresh or saltwater, frozen or liquid. According to Charles Fishman, the author of THE BIG THIRST: THE SECRET LIFE AND TURBULENT FUTURE OF WATER, the water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Rather than only three states of water—liquid, ice, and vapor—there is a fourth, “molecular water,” fused into rock 400 miles deep in the Earth, and that’s where most of the planet’s water is found. Unlike most precious resources, water cannot be used up; it can always be made clean enough again to drink—indeed, water can be made so clean that it’s toxic. Water is the most vital substance in our lives but also more amazing and mysterious than we appreciate. As Charles Fishman and other scholars and scientists have argued, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, yet we take it completely for granted. These authors have argued the era of easy water is over. For this issue of “About Place,” we look forward to reading work that investigates and commemorates our complex relationship with water.
Editor: Debra Marquart’s book include two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb (New Rivers Press, 1996) and From Sweetness (Pearl Editions, 2002) and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories (New Rivers Press, 2001) which draws on her experiences as a road musician. Marquart’s work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize from the Faulkner Society, the Headwaters Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Prose Fellowship. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint Books, 2006) was awarded the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart teaches in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine, and she is a professor of English and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, in addition to being a fellow at Black Earth Institute. Her next book, a poetry collection titled Small Buried Things, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press.
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Submissions must be made through our Submissions Manager at the link below.
>via: http://aboutplacejournal.org/submissions/