Call for Submissions for writing and visual art:
Reveries & Rage Anthology
We are seeking poetry (up to 3 poems, 1-2 pages each), fiction (up to 5,000 words), micro-fiction (100-300 words), flash fiction (up to 1000 words), creative non-fiction (up to 5,000 words), by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Trans*, Two-Spirit and other gender and sexuality non-conforming People of Color (QTPOC), that address various aspects of QTPOC experience, including but not limited to writing that illuminates histories and the present, in regards to racism, sexism, homoantagonism, transantagonism, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, imperialism, orientalism, social movements, community healing, social justice, imagination and possibility, freedom. We are also seeking visual art to be used for the cover, in the form of painting, drawing, photography, or mixed media.
**For a note on our use of the terms “Queer”, “Person of Color”, and the acronym QTPOC: Please seehttp://reveries-rage.tumblr.com/QTPOCnote
***If you identify as heterosexual, or white, or not somehow in the QTPOC spectrum, please refrain from submitting. We appreciate the support of our non-QTPOC allies in understanding that this particular project will only be featuring Queer and Trans*/genderqueer/two-spirit people of color.
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What we want (& this also applies to the visual art): Writing that punches us in the gut; writing that makes us ache and then makes us ache for more; writing that is committed to a politics and ethics of freedom, to anti-oppression, to anti-normativity; writing that heals you in the writing and heals us in the reading; writing that moves us to dream, to reach higher, and deeper; writing that disalienates; writing that seeks to change the world, that seeks to cut deep into the forces that violate our histories and bodies; writing that is born from love and writing that mourns; writing that is complicated and unsettling, never easy; writing that celebrates… words that sing…
We want writing and art that are beckoned by this:
There’s a lot of what I would call comfortable poetry around. But then there is all this other stuff going on — which is wilder, which is bristling; it’s juicier, it’s everything that you would want. And it’s not comfortable. That’s the kind of poetry that interests me — a field of energy. It’s intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual — all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture. – Adrienne Rich
And this:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. – Franz Kafka
And this:
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way… people look at reality, then you can change it. – James Baldwin
And this:
“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” – Edwidge Danticat
What we will avoid: non-reflexive, reactive work that polices or regulates on others in ways that will crush voices and possibilities for building solidarities between worlds.
Writing Submissions: Submit all work in ONE DOCUMENT, in .doc or .docx format, 12 pt font, times new roman, one inch margins. Include a brief cover letter/bio (including a note on how you identify under the QTPOC umbrella), as the first page in the word document you are submitting. You may submit to only one genre.
Visual Art Submissions: Submit up to three images in jpg format. Please use a dpi of at least 300 and an image size of 10×14 inches. Include a brief cover letter/bio in the email body when you submit, (including a note on how you identify under the QTPOC umbrella). You may also provide a link to a c.v. if you wish.
Simultaneous submissions allowed, please alert us upon acceptance elsewhere. All work must be previously unpublished. Email submissions as an attachment to reveriesrage@gmail.com. In subject line of email please indicate the genre you are submitting to, and also include your first and last name. Don’t just list what you’ve published before, give us a sense of who you are as much as possible in less than a page. DEADLINE: April 30, 2014. Simultaneous submissions allowed, but please notify us immediately upon acceptance to another publication. No multiple submissions in the same category, but submitting once to each category is okay. Please send us only your most polished work. Whether or not you’ve been published will not bear upon acceptance.
We will be seeking a publisher while compiling the anthology. Currently, there is no payment for publication. This is a project we are not paid for, and are not profiting from though if there are ways for us to get copies of the final text to contributors, we will do so.
Writers and Artists give Reveries and Rage first publication rights, and all rights will revert to writer/artist after publication.***
Email any questions to reveriesrage@gmail.com.
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Reveries & Rage is a Queer and Trans* People of Color-centered Creative Justice Project.
Join us at www.facebook.com/reveries.rage and http://reveries-rage.tumblr.com
Our mission statement is as follows:
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
-Audre Lorde
As Queer and Trans* People of Color (QTPOC), our lives are rooted in deep histories as well as present-day struggles, against political, economic, psychological, and spiritual forces that have sought to assimilate and annihilate us along with our peoples. The world has been systematically configured to undo us, to wretch us from local knowledge, to colonize our lands and our imaginations. The tenacity of hegemony means that as QTPOC, every day of our lives is in some way or another confronted with the pervasive violence of systemic whiteness, heteronormativity and homophobia, cis-normativity and transphobia, all configured through other elements of our diverse lives: religion and/or spirituality, class, nationality,…the list is long.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, ‘We were never meant to survive.’ And we mourn that many of our own havefallen. But we are here. We have survived, we continue to fight: for rights, for visibility, for equity, for decolonization, for our own places in the world, for our voices to be heard and listened to.
We rage. We rage big for the heartbreak of our ancestors that still rings deep in us; for the violations of our bodies, our spirit practices, our livelihoods; violations that have worked to sever the fabric of our communities. We rage at the mandate for our docility, our insipid mediocrity, our forgetting, our submission. And we refuse it.
And we dream. We dream of change and beauty and self-love and loving others and full bellies and clean waters and growing healthy, fierce children and community prosperity. We dream of not just cultural survival but cultural thriving. We dream of a more just world all around us. And we see dreaming as a vital birthplace of social change. Dreaming begets thought and action.
Two elements of our ongoing practices—for our survival, our defiance, our blooming, for justice. With the vigor of our loving fury, this is: REVERIES AND RAGE.
>via: http://reveries-rage.tumblr.com