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Call for Multilingual Writing — Deadline September 15, 2018

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10/1/18: Polyphonic Poets Announced!

We were bowled over blown away amazed atingle and deeply impressed by the range and quality of the work we received for our In Praise of Polyphony call. Thank you everyone.

Our congratulations and gratitude to Ching-In Chen, Maija Makinen, Jeni De La O, Piotr Gwiazda, Allison Escoto, and Diana Anaya whose work will be featured.

We are now sending the selected writing out to artists, and we are, as always, eager to see how visual language adds another layer of nuance to the work.

8/15/18: Introducing Polyphony

We found a name!  Thank you Kaja Weeks for suggesting “Polyphony” as a term. It is just what we were seeking, and we have officially named this feature “In Praise of Polyphony.”

Call for Submissions: Work In Multiple Languages

Many writers move through the world speaking and thinking in more than one language, whether they were raised in a house that spoke two or more languages, lived in multiple countries over their lives, or found love and community with people tied to another culture.  At Broadsided Press, we think that’s worth celebrating.

Perhaps, for you, only the Chinese word for ‘wave’ (波) will accurately capture the symbolism behind the word, the sound, the gesture of an ocean’s movement; only the Spanish phrase for ‘my sister, (mi hermana) encapsulates the intimacy inherent in that relationship; or the Arabic word for ‘fig’ (تين) must be used when gesturing toward the fruit of life’s abundance, endurance, and peace.

Our literature and lives are enriched when many traditions and languages sing together.  Indeed, multilingualism is, for most of the world, the norm rather than the exception (see article by G. Richard Tucker). In this special “Broadsided Responds” feature, we will offer a folio of work that speaks and sings between and with multiple languages.

If you write/think/speak in multiple languages, please send work that features and explores this rich convergence. We’d like to honor writers whose bilingual/multilingual family history prompted this mode of writing, rather than those who came to languages through academic study.  We rely on you to decide if this is the right space for your submission.

If selected for publication, your work will be responded to by a visual artist (another act of translation!) and made into a broadside that any and all can download, print, and share.  We’d love to see the streets of the world celebrating multiple cultures and languages in conversation.

Please know that although this is a special “Responses” feature, we continue to welcome and look forward to reading multilingual writing for all of our publications.  Send us work!

GUIDELINES: Our general guidelines for length apply.  There is a special button on Submittable for this feature.

DEADLINE: September 15, 2018

PS: We are still working on the official title of this final folio.  Polyglot is just not a pretty word! Multilingual fits, but it’s also a bit unwieldy.  If you have suggestions, let us know via email broadsided(at)gmail.com, or on our social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

A note about “Broadsided Responds” features:  Sometimes, the events in the world are so insistent that they consume us. We can’t stop thinking about them. Brushing teeth, driving, washing dishes—they persist. At Broadsided Responds, writers and artists respond to situations in the world with their best, most empathetic, most insightful, most wide-ranging selves.  Over the years, we’ve run these special features honoring work that engages with the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan; the water protectors at Standing Rock in the #NoDAPL movement; the Syrian refugee crisis and more.  This will be our eighth Responses feature.

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