Now open for submissions from June 19 - July 18.
dezireé a. brown is one of our four editors-in-chief for our 2024 Community Anthologies. You can read more about the program here, about the 2024 cohort here, and how this program originally came to be here. Below is the call for submission for dezireé’s anthology, On Gaming, as well as what dezireé is looking for in submissions.
“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.”
To submit, please visit our Submittable page here.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.
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.
