Our 2025 Community Anthologies are now open for submissions. The deadline to submit is July 27, 2025.
We are excited to announce that our 2025 Community Anthologies are now open for submissions. The deadline to submit is July 27, 2025. This year, we are publishing five Community Anthologies, compared to four in previous years, which means we’re creating more space for your work. Each anthology publishes 6-8 writers and artists. You will also see that some anthologies are being curated by one EIC, while others are curated by two co-EICs.
To read more about this year’s EICs, see our Insights post here. If you are a writer or artist whose work engages with the public around the pressing social issues of our times, explore this year’s topics below. We look forward to reading your work.
On Separation, curated by Naomi Day
Separation — detachment, uncoupling, sundering — is a foundational human experience. We begin life by discovering ourselves as separate from those who birthed us. We depart from and renegotiate boundaries with loved ones as we grow older, and we learn to release belief systems in order to invite in new ones. We engage in consistent and ongoing rhythms of recalibration across both our heaviest and most joyous times.
This anthology invites musings on separation as both an act of love and an essential path to nurturing our new worlds. The topic is grounded in my experience of separation as both hurt and hope, and my curiosity towards the deep kindness seeded within that spectrum. What is the breaking and the building that takes place within individual and communal severing? If we take transformations within interpersonal relationships as impetus for radical change on a larger scale, what systems can we separate from and redefine our relationships with? When we dismantle bridges we no longer wish to cross, what pathways emerge for future reconnection? Separation invokes grief, but it also invites brightness — the gleam of a life perhaps never anticipated, but on its way regardless.
This anthology is open to submissions from BIPOC writers and artists, and I’m particularly interested in work from Black and queer creatives. I’m eager for words that stretch across genre and medium in forms such as speculative narratives, photo essays, and hybrid creations. I invite all work that uniquely engages with visions of hope, meditations on transformation, and the persistence of separation.
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This anthology is curated by Naomi Day. You can read more about Naomi and our other 2025 EICs, here. To submit to this anthology, please visit our Submittable page here. You can also find more information about our Submission Guidelines here.
CloseOn Liminality, curated by Sanam Sheriff
Often, when we think of the liminal, we conjure in-betweenness, a period or phase in which we are neither in one state nor the next, but in transition, intermediate. This anthology invites you to consider the in-between as multitude. Not “neither here nor there,” but here and there. The poet and writer Divya Victor urges us to approach a threshold not just as a bridge between two places, but as a place in and of itself. I extend that invitation to you.
As we witness the unveiling of a far-right, xenophobic ideology on a global scale — one that relegates in-betweenness to the margins — this call centers an expansive framework of the liminal by inviting queer, trans, and immigrant writers to the fore. How do the pluralities of body, place, state, love, shame, lineage, loss, longing, and belonging translate into your work? What does it look like to stretch the bounds of language and genre to hold such an expansive articulation?
This anthology is eager to engage with practices of trans poetics, the queering of english, and the hybridity of transnational lives rendered into lyric and sentence. What if liminality is the place we have arrived to, the place from which we now speak?
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This anthology is curated by Sanam Sheriff. You can read more about Sanam and our other 2025 EICs, here. To submit to this anthology, please visit our Submittable page here. You can also find more information about our Submission Guidelines here.
CloseOn Collapse, curated by Emilio Carrero
This anthology invites submissions that are primed to collapse. How might a story, or a poem, or an essay, collapse? Do they cave in on themselves? Destroy their surroundings? Explode, supernova-like, from within? What are the sights, contours, and sounds of these eruptions?
When James Brown collapsed to the floor each night while singing onstage, drenched and exhausted; when Truong Tran collapsed the separations between poetry and life in Book of the Other: small in comparison; when Saidiya Hartman collapsed the false promises of the archive in “Venus in Two Acts” — what kinds of unimaginable desires were they manifesting?
Queer theorist Jack Halberstam describes the aesthetics of collapse as “unmaking the world” through anarchist practices of demolition, dispossession, and failure. Collapse, then, might not be ruination, the rubbles of an unfulfilled dream, but the transgenerational desire to unmake colonial and imperial dreams that have, for so many, become a nightmare. What heartful and insistent compositions, what unrelenting wishes are made against the backdrop of what Black Studies scholar Nahum Chandler calls a “black horizon”? For this anthology, I welcome work across genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, & hybrid) that are inspired by the unpredictable, unimaginable potential of collapse.
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This anthology is curated by Emilio Carrero. You can read more about Emilio and our other 2025 EICs, here. To submit to this anthology, please visit our Submittable page here. You can also find more information about our Submission Guidelines here.
CloseOn Girlhood, curated by K-Ming Chang and Hairol Ma
Girlhood is often defined as a universal experience, depicted in simplistic, regressive, or romanticized ways. But the narrative of girlhood demands to be set free, to be given the space to be transgressive, expansive, newly possible, or transformative.
As the poet Yanyi once wrote, “Womanhood is the country I come from, a home I reach back for to reproduce, recreate, replenish.” In a similar vein, what does it mean for girlhood to be the country you came from, left behind, or are still traversing or transforming within?
For this anthology, we’re looking for all possibilities and interpretations of girlhood: as the space of becoming, as a place to destabilize, and as the grounds for discovering who you are, even if it means leaving it behind or destroying it from the inside.
We’re open to writing of all genres and all forms that are interested in the topic of girlhood. We invite the peripheral, the strange, the rageful, the loving, the destructive, the tender, the critical, the resistant, the hesitant. We invite writers to approach the idea of girlhood from any and every angle that excites them.
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This anthology is co-curated by K-Ming Chang and Hairol Ma. You can read more about K-Ming and Hairol, as well as our other 2025 EICs, here. To submit to this anthology, please visit our Submittable page here. You can also find more information about our Submission Guidelines here.
CloseOn Repetition, curated by Jody Chan and Noa Sun
Sometimes, repetition is stuckness — a growing internal tension, rotation on a fixed point, a deferral of what is needed to break free, a returning over and over to what we already know doesn’t work. But repetition can also be a form of rehearsal, or even a propulsion — towards freedom, towards living, towards what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney refer to as the “wild beyond.”
This anthology is interested in repetition as generative and destructive; as a creative device and a constraining force. Black studies scholar Bedour Alagraa defines catastrophe as a repetition of the originary events of colonialism and slavery. But this piling up of crisis is also defined by its vulnerability to interruption. In Alagraa’s words, “Against the breathless numbers, the cruel mathematics, and the assumed unbreakability of the interminable, the meter breaks.”
There are, and always have been, openings that break the meter of colonialism and Western liberalism. From boycotts and blockades to stopping arrests and deportations, organized people attempt over and over to interrupt every kind of abandonment, every kind of enclosure. How can language prefigure new rhythms and expressions of freedom, new openings for action — and widen existing ones?
This anthology invites experiments with form, genre, and medium; pieces that both practice and study repetition. What effects can be generated from the doing of language — its ritual, its collective choreography, its movement through our minds, bodies, and political practices? What lies within and beyond repetition?
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This anthology is co-curated by Jody Chan and Noa Sun. You can read more about Jody and Noa, as well as our other 2025 EICs, here. To submit to this anthology, please visit our Submittable page here. You can also find more information about our Submission Guidelines here.
CloseTo learn more about our 2025 EICs, as well as our 2025 Finalists, see our Insights post here.
FAQ: Interested in submitting your work?
If you are interested in submitting your work to one of our 2025 Community Anthologies, please see the info below:
- Submit via Submittable. To submit, please visit our Submittable page here.
- Fee-waiver via email. If the $7 submission fee is prohibitive, you may submit your full application via email by sending your complete submission and cover letter to submit@seventhwavemag.com by July 27, 2025. There is no cap to fee-waived submissions.
- Zoom info session for submitters. We will be hosting a Zoom info session on July 15, which will go over our Community Anthologies program, as well as the submissions and editorial processes. You can register for the Zoom info session here.
- Should you submit? If one of our calls — and more specifically, one of the questions in one of the calls — interests you, then chances are that your work will interest one of our EICs. Please note that you may only submit to one anthology for each intake.
- What is this Community Anthology program, and how is it different from the literary magazine? Each one of our Community Anthologies is curated by an Editor-in-Chief or Editors-in-Chief. Seventh Wave hires 4-5 EICs each year to curate our Community Anthologies. You can learn more about the program, as well as read our past Community Anthologies here, and you can also find more information about the program on our FAQ page.
- Contributor Payment. Seventh Wave pays everyone it publishes. For Community Anthology contributors, payment for prose and poetry is $100, similar to our payment for the literary magazine.
- Still have a question? If you don’t find an answer to your question, feel free to email us at submit@seventhwavemag.com. We’ll get back to you within 2-3 business days.
Read more on our FAQ page here. We can’t wait to read your work.