We're giving the editorial keys to curators.
In an era when so many literary magazines are closing their doors, we are dedicated to building more platforms for our communities’ voices.
Welcome to our Community Anthologies program. Each year through an application process, Seventh Wave brings in 4 community curators to produce their own “community anthology.” Think: special issue, digital folios, mini series. Each anthology showcases 6-8 artists or writers in each, publishing a total of 24-32 additional voices per year. Our editors-in-chief work as a cohort, supporting each other as they curate their own topics and calls for submissions, work with their 6-8 contributors, and finally, publish their individual anthologies. We call them “community anthologies,” because that’s what they are: anthologies of community, conversation, and voice. You can see our 2023 Community Anthologies here. Below, you can get to know our 2024 EICs and the Community Anthologies they are curating, which will be open for submissions in June 2024.
We are thrilled to welcome Xu Li, Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal, dezireé a brown, and Para Vadhahong as our 2024 editors-in-chief. You can see more information about each below.
In order of appearance above from left to right:
Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal is a poet, editor, drag queen, Dua Lipa stan, climate organizer, Bundist, and Junior Bake Off enthusiast. Isaiah received an MFA from The Ohio State University, where they served as Managing Editor for The Journal and was an Abolition and Freedom Dreams fellow, leading poetry workshops for community organizers and activists. Their writing can be found in or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, MAYDAY, Foglifter, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets.
dezireé a. brown (they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith Award from the University of Illinois Chicago, where they received a Ph.D. in English with concentrations in Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies. They received an MFA from Northern Michigan University and were also a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, often claiming to have been born with a poem written across their chest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in wildness, Four Way Review, Foglifter Journal, Obsidian, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others.
Para Vadhahong is a Thai diaspora poet and artist. Their writing can be spotted in Salt Hill Journal, The Hyacinth Review, Lover’s Eye Press, Ice Lolly Review, fifth wheel press, DVAN, Sine Theta, Honey Literary, and others. They are the winner of Salt Hill Journal’s Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize (2022), the Lex Allen Literary Festival’s Fiction Prize (2023), Hollins University’s Nancy Thorp Poetry Prize (2023), and Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize for Women Poets (2023). They are a CNF reader for Atlas and Alice and a past editor for Gravel and Cargoes at Hollins University.
If you are interested in submitting to one of our Community Anthologies, please see the information below. You may also visit our Submit Page, and you will also find the bulk of this information on our Submittable Page:
- 2024 Submission Dates. Submissions are open from June 19 to July 18.
- Submittable. You will submit via Submittable here. There is one submission form for all anthologies. On the submission form, you will select which anthology you are submitting to.
- You may submit to only one anthology. You may only submit to one anthology per year. You may not submit the same or different work to two or more anthology calls. Before submitting, please read the call you are submitting to. Each call is different, and each call has different requirements.
- Eligibility. If you have been published in a Community Anthology before, you may not submit again to another. However, if you have been published in TSW’s annual literary magazine, you are eligible to submit to a Community Anthology. Please note: “On Endings” and “On Prayer” are open to all writers/artists; “On Queer Family” is only open to queer, trans, and gender nonconforming writers and artists; and “On Gaming” is only open to queer POC writers and artists. In terms of genre/form, please read the calls to see what type of work each EIC is looking for.
- General Guidelines. At TSW, we are a digital magazine, so your work must be able to be published in a digital format. We do not consider/publish previously published work. For prose, we accept submissions up to 3,000 words; for poetry, we accept up to 4 poems; and for artwork, it depends on your submission and project.
- Questions. If you have questions about the submission process, please email submit@seventhwavemag.com.
- Acceptances. You will be notified by the first week of August if you were accepted or not. If accepted, you will be working with the editor-in-chief toward publication.
- Anthology Details. Each anthology will select and publish 6-8 writers/artists. The anthologies will publish in January 2025. If accepted, you will join a TSW Orientation Session in August, which will set expectations for the editorial process, and you will then work with your EIC toward publication from September to November.
- Payment. Each contributor receives $100 payment for publication.
Please find more information on our FAQ page and our Submittable page.
Curated by Xu Li.
Anthology Call: This anthology invites a dwelling in ending(s). An ending can be a material one, a manner of re-orientation, or a point of private and public departure and transformation that carries itself, despite itself, onward. What are the different gestures an ending can hold? What are its passages, its fugitivities? Its escalations and unmakings? Its endurings? I’ve been thinking a lot about endings, lately; not a singular volta, but of turning and turning — Aditi Machado in The End asks, “and now? Am I changed? Is the world? I’ve lifted myself off the page and what sort of gesture is this?” As poets, we often name an ending as where a poem has arrived to its last lines, its keenest revelation, but a multitude of endings may live in a single poem or piece of writing as it moves through its lyric. A poem or an essay can end and end again. Solmaz Sharif, too, has shared that for her own writing, “Marx has always been a huge influence on me: the point isn’t to think about the world, but to change it. As a writer, my addendum is that the point of literature isn’t to just understand the world, but to end it.” As Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza continues to its 256th day, there’s the endings that we daily act toward: the end of the decades-long, punishing occupation of Palestine, of the same occupying forces in the U.S. Here is a space for our polyvocal movement, our enduring refusals against the current capitalist and imperial order, of all the grammars that lift a colonial world into sequence.
Submission Requirements: This call is open to all types of writers and artists (hybrid included). In terms of genre/form, Xu is specifically looking for poetry (long(er) poems especially encouraged), lyric essays, and creative non-fiction. Submissions are now closed.
Curated by Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal.
Anthology Call: Queer people have always defined family on our own terms. From the legendary houses of Harlem’s ball scene to lesbian separatist communes, queer people imagine, reimagine, and materialize new ways of living and living together. For this anthology, I want to honor the intentional, loving, resilient, subaltern, oppositional families that queer people create: your drag mothers and trans siblings, your co-ops and polycules, your queer entanglements with nature and non-human kin, your chosen lineages across time and space. In all its manifold forms, queer family is a project of world making, of fashioning loving communities and liberated selves through desire and mutual exchange. As Joss Lake writes, “Well, isn’t queer adulthood, if one is lucky, having the impossible childhood of your desires?” What are your impossible queer dreams? What does kinship look like beyond the ties enshrined by the State? What is the role of the family in our collective liberation? This is an invitation for models of care that help us imagine beyond the violence of the present. For this anthology, I am looking for poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction, or multimodal art by queer, trans, and gender nonconforming writers.
Submission Requirements: This anthology is only open to queer, trans, and gender nonconforming writers and artists. In terms of form/genre, Isaiah is specifically interested in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimodal art. This call is also a hybrid call: Isaiah will be inviting 1-3 contributors to submit work, and the remaining 5-7 spots will be filled via an open call on Submittable (each anthology publishes 6-8 people). Submissions are now closed.
Curated by dezireé a. brown.
Anthology Call: The video game industry and community has not been welcoming to marginalized gamers, whether they be people of color, gender variant, disabled, and/or queer. Historically, we were not allowed on-screen, we dealt with toxicity and harassment in online settings, and games were not created with us in mind. Many of these issues still remain; however, we continue to carve out spaces for ourselves and flourish despite hostilities and erasures. Our demands for inclusion along with the increasing accessibility of game-making have resulted in titles like The Gunk and Celeste that offer multifaceted characters that we can see ourselves in. We’ve created repositories like the Black Games Archive to think critically about how video games can function as agents of structural inequity and/or social change. We build communities in online gaming spaces to run raids, manage busy farms, and cultivate support for marginalized content creators with organizations like The Disabled Content Creators Collective.
This call seeks to address, through poetry, prose, and art, this complex genre of education and entertainment from the perspective of queer people of color. This anthology will speak to both the joy and nostalgia that can be experienced playing video games as well as the structural inequities reflected in the genre. I want to see your clan battles, love stories, respawns, journeys, horrors, dreams, personal vendettas, and moments of rage and quiet reflection. In what ways have video games impacted or changed you? How have they helped you survive our present world and envision new ones? Submissions can engage with video games in both/either content and form, and submissions from Black and Palestinian queer folk as well as gender variant and disabled queer poc are especially encouraged.
Submission Requirements: This anthology is only open to queer POC writers and artists. In terms of form, Dez is looking for creative writing — poetry, flash fiction, flash CNF, short screenplays, hybrid, and interactive works — and visual art. Submissions are now closed.
Curated by Para Vadhahong.
Anthology Call: To whom do you pray for nourishment and justice in the face of oppression? What kind of faith do you carve out for yourself? What private, public, communal, mythical, or cultural rituals do you draw your own sense of devotion from? A prayer can be a litany of desires; a call to action; an upholding of the self and the beloved; a life-giving elegy. A prayer can transcend organized structures of religion, connecting the devotee to recipients of their devotion regardless of time and distance. In the midst of genocide in Gaza, I am moved to consider the role of prayer as a force of protest and healing. Prayers are a testament to endurance: the devotee’s test of mettle in the wake of grief and loss. This open-call anthology invites any creative expression—poems, narratives, music, photographs, songs, and art—about ancestors and spirits, gods and ghosts, beloveds and other entities. What scripture, if any, do you derive value or deviate from? Are there prayers in your writing and art-making practice? I invite you to send irreverent work that pushes boundaries of prayer, that reclaims godhood for yourselves in the search for day-to-day meaning.
Submission Requirements: BIPOC artists are encouraged to submit, though this call is open to all writers and artists. Submissions are now closed.
We Keep Beginning:
An Anthology on Process
In this anthology, you’ll find musings about the use of line breaks and white space in poetry, as well as thoughts on rough drafts, nostalgia, and motivation (or a lack thereof). You’ll read about heartache, legacy, and representation, and why it matters who our contributors are creating for. What unites them all is an indelible dedication to their craft, and to understanding the impact and the role of their words in the context of the worlds around them.
Our next print anthology will likely be in 2025. Sign up for our mailing list and stay tuned for further information.
What are the different gestures an ending can hold? What are its passages, its fugitivities? Its escalations and unmakings? Its endurings?
What are your impossible queer dreams? What does kinship look like beyond the ties enshrined by the State? What is the role of the family in our collective liberation? This is an invitation for models of care that help us imagine beyond the violence of the present.
I want to see your clan battles, love stories, respawns, journeys, horrors, dreams, personal vendettas, and moments of rage and quiet reflection. In what ways have video games impacted or changed you? How have they helped you survive our present world and envision new ones?
To whom do you pray for nourishment and justice in the face of oppression? What kind of faith do you carve out for yourself? What private, public, communal, mythical, or cultural rituals do you draw your own sense of devotion from?
- “If you haven’t collaborated with Seventh Wave yet then you’re missing out on a deeper level of practicing community.”
- “I am still mostly new to the publishing world, but I don’t know that any other experience will ever compare to this time with TSW. The experience went well beyond the usual ‘We love your piece and would like to publish it.’ From that first acceptance letter to the final notes on pub day, I felt a genuine connection to TSW.
- “Easily the most positive publishing experience I’ve had with a journal! Most of the time elsewhere it’s so much less involvement and communication, and you feel a bit like a cog in a machine — and this was so delightfully NOT that.”
- “The Seventh Wave is among my favorite community oriented writing spaces for many reasons, not the least of which are the ways they are unafraid to step up to difficult topics and the ways they empower others to do the same.”
- “There is a different feeling to being published as part of cohort, all writing toward the same theme. Whatever that feeling is — community, care, solidarity, grace — The Seventh Wave, in its gestures, is holding this space, a space where our words can not only sit side by side but as part of a shared vision.”
- “There are a lot of literary magazines in the world; what sets TSW apart is the way they run. From submission to editing to publication to promotion, everyone I worked with at TSW kept things clear and well-organized, and made me feel truly valued and appreciated as a contributor.”
- “The Seventh Wave’s approach to publication is truly radical in the best of ways. The level of support from the moment of acceptance was such that I knew my piece had found the best possible home and that I had found a community of incredible writers to share my experience with. Perhaps the best part is knowing that there are more opportunities to continue to continue being inspired by this incredible community in my future.”
- “What a gift these Community Anthologies are. As a POC writer I felt seen and heard during the whole process. Some of my hesitations about the publishing space were quickly allayed by the responsiveness and honesty of the TSW team! It was truly a mutual relationship and one I was happy to be apart of! I wish more publishers would take note.”