Pitches wanted (Black / Asian American feminist solidarities) | $300 to $450 per essay

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: THE MARGINS

A collaboration between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities is a monthly series published in AAWW’s The Margins that launched in July 2020. This ongoing project looks to Black and Asian American feminist histories, practices, and frameworks on care, community, and survival for the tools and strategies to continue to build towards collective liberation.

With two years under our belt, the editors of Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities are looking for pitches and submissions to shape the next phase in this series.

Since we started this project, people in Black and Asian communities have been reckoning with grief, loss, heartbreak, and death at different scales. We are witnessing in real time the stripping of reproductive rights; the ways state-based responses to violence pit Black and Asian communities against each other; and attempts to legislate queer and trans people out of existence.

In reflecting on solidarity, we often are left with more questions than answers.

What does it mean to create and nurture solidarity at this juncture? We’re currently seeking new pitches and finished pieces that interrogate past, present, and future issues within the realm of Black and Asian feminist solidarities, and that imagine possibilities between our communities through various written forms.

TOPICS AND APPROACHES OF SPECIFIC INTEREST INCLUDE:

• Environmental justice and water protection; land, water, and place as solidarity; islands and oceans as connective sites; ancestral foodways and ecologies; and growing and caring for land and nature
• Storytelling centering queer intimacies, friendships, kinships, and relationships across race
• Reproductive justice, care work, and labor
• Speculative fiction exploring fantasy, myth, magic, histories, futures, and more
• Histories, genealogies, and inheritances of movements and migration
• Transnational approaches to abolition politics, including political imprisonment, war, and demilitarization
• Ending caste apartheid, politics of colorism, interrogations of racial categories and hierarchies of racialization
• Navigating conflicts, tensions, difficulties, contradictions, and controversies within and across communities
• Joy, love, and pleasure as solidarity including gatherings, sex and romance, and humor
• Engagements with feminist literatures and critique and writing as craft

We invite submissions and pitches on feminist solidarities from creative writers, poets, community organizers, workers, artists, journalists, and scholars.

We are seeking FINISHED SUBMISSIONS in the following genres and forms:

• Short creative stories across genres including speculative fiction, young adult, and romance
• Illustrations, graphics, and comics
• Creative nonfiction including personal essays and historical narratives
• Poetry, letters, journal entries, songs, and spells

We are also open to PITCHES for: Interviews and conversations

• Researched or reported works
• Political and cultural criticism and commentary
• Collaborative works, hybrid genres, and/or exploratory formats

We are currently not seeking submissions for commentary and reported works that require timely or urgent publication.

GUIDELINES

Email your finished submission or pitch as a .doc/x, or Google doc to bafs@aaww.org.

Please format the title of your submission as follows: “LAST NAME – Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities – TITLE OF PIECE or PITCH .”

Include your preferred name for publishing and a short biography (maximum 100 words).

For finished pieces, we welcome:

• essays up to a maximum of 3,000 words
• short fiction up to 3,500 words
• poetry, illustrations, and hybrid work up to 10 pages or panels for consideration

Please include any image attachments as .jpgs or .pngs.

If you are sending a pitch, please indicate your plan and timeline for completion.

Please also include a short cover letter (max 300 words) about how you connect to this call as an author and how your submitted work relates to this call. Feel free to respond in a way that aligns with the aims of your work.

If our editors decide to move forward with a pitch or submission, writers can expect a reply within six weeks to three months. Although we cannot guarantee a response to all pitches and pieces, our editors will do their best to get back to all writers. We appreciate your patience.

We will pay for published pieces. The Margins‘ 2022 rate sheet is here.

CONTACT INFORMATION (please do not share the email address publicly):

Questions / submissions: bafs@aaww.org

Website: https://aaww.org/project/black-asian-feminist-solidarities/

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