Now open for submissions from June 19 - July 18.
Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal 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 Isaiah’s anthology, On Queer Family, as well as what Isaiah is looking for in submissions.
“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.”
To submit, please visit our Submittable page here. 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).
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.
