Call for Submissions!
Letras Latinas and Apogee Journal invite disabled latinx poets to submit poems for consideration for a special folio edited by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes.
Atlas: Skin/Bone/Blood
Bodymaps in Brown and Black
What our bodies, my mother’s and yours and mine, require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies. We need nourishment, equilibrium, water, connection, justice. When I write about cancer and exhaustion and irritable bowels in the context of the treeless slopes of my homeland, of market-driven famine of xenoestrogens and the possible extinction of bees, I am tracing that map with my fingertips, walking into the heart of the storm that shakes my body and occupies the world.
~ Aurora Levins Morales, Disabled, Puerto Rican Writer and Activist. From, “Mountain Moving Day” in Kindling: Writings on the Body (Cambridge: Palabrera Press, 2013.)
Our bodies tell stories, carry historical memory, bear the intergenerational traumas and forms of resilience we’ve inherited from our ancestors. Our bodies share ways of knowing and being, with and as a part of the planet’s vibrant human and more-than-human ecologies. The memory of land and what our bodies carry are deeply intertwined. In the ongoingness of settler colonial violence, our bodies, selves, land, communities, and life itself, are variously entangled with, subjected to, and complicit in its persistence through extractivism, exploitation of land and labor, and racial-carceral systems that both debilitate us and produce ideas about which bodies matter.
This collection seeks to address these themes at the intersections of latinidad and disability, to put forth a poetics of black and brown racial and disability justice. What storms shake your body and occupy the worlds of you, the worlds you are, and the worlds you live in and move through? What are the relations between geography and corporeal experience that illuminate what is vital and necessary about solidarities between the work of racial justice and disability justice? What stories do you need to tell, about how your body carries the land and how the land has carried your body? What maps to history and to liberatory futures are found in the atlas of your skin, bone, and blood?
Call for Work: Seeking poems on the themes addressed above from disabled Latinx/Latine/Latina/Latino writers.
We welcome submissions in English; and encourage submissions in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages, accompanied by English-language translations.
Please submit 3-5 unpublished poems totaling no more than ten pages to apogeejournal.org/submit by Thursday, June 30th.
In your cover letter, please include a bio of 100-150 words.
*There will be a $100 honorarium for poets included in the folio. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, this folio is an extension of the March 29th, 2022 event by the same title, hosted by the Writer’s Center, and commissioned by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, as part of the 2022 Poetry Coalition initiative themed on, “The future lives in our bodies: Poetry & Disability Justice.”
