Queer Poetry – Call for Submissions! #PrideMonth

Call for Submissions
An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia

 

Editors: Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal

HarperCollins Publishers India

Email for submissions and queries: queerpoetrysouthasia@gmail.com

Deadline: 31 July 2018

This #PrideMonth, we are super excited to announce that we’re putting together an anthology of Queer Poetry from across South Asia.

We seek submissions of poems being written by Transmen, Transwomen, Lesbian, Hijra, Kothi, Gay, Aravani, Khawaja Sara, Intersex, Jogappa, Bisexual, Drag King/Queen, GenderQueer, Non-Binary, Meyeli Chele, Asexual, Butch, Femme, Nupi Maanbi, Nupa Maanba, Thirunangai and other poets writing in the subcontinent and in its many diasporas today.

We invite poems that would make us think about our many different queer lives in startling ways. These poems could be about our many communities, our loves and losses, our individual eccentricities, the homes we were born in, the homes we chose, our moments of coming together and equally, our fundamental differences with each other. We want these poems to think about what this thing called a ‘queer life’, one-part beautiful one-part brutish, is made of. How gender and sexuality are not the only things behind it. How many aspects of our person and world – whether it be caste, class, age, size, religion, region, language or nationality – really make our relation to our genders and sexualities vitally possible. Your poems could engage with all this or spill over it. Your poems could answer what we wish or militate against it. Your poems could romanticize or demystify. We just want to be enraptured by what you send us.

Your poems could be in any language of the subcontinent, including English. You could be a poet just starting out or someone who has been writing for years. And by a ‘poem’, we mean all its forms. Songs, shayari, lyrics, prose-poems, haikus, scribblings, free-verse, page-poems, stage-poems, what have you. As is evident, we don’t have any one criteria of what ‘queer poetry’ is in terms of theme or form (as if there could be one!). It is whatever you want it to be and we seek submissions that will reflect your queer lives, emotions, ideas, challenges and flights of fancy.

This is going to be a special volume for all of us and we want to make it ambitious and inclusive. We want to make a particular effort to include poets from across South Asia, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Bhutan, Maldives, Afghanistan, conflict regions of Kashmir, Baluchistan and within the ‘Northeast’, and their many diasporas. Since across South Asia, our lives as queer people are both fucked up and joyous in many different and similar ways, we seek this volume to reflect these many queer worlds that belong to us. For those of you who would like to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym for your submissions for this book, we enthusiastically welcome your poems as well.

We seek submissions both in non-English languages and in English. Although the volume will finally be printed in English, we want to make a real effort to include non-English queer voices in translation. If you are submitting in any non-English language, it would be wonderful if you can attach an English translation. However, don’t worry if a translation is not available. We have a team of translators among us who can help us with translating your work in consultation with you.

Please email us your poems (up to 8 poems) by 31st July, 2018. Do send us suggestions for poets you think we should get in touch with. Feel free to share any questions that you might have for us. We would be happy to respond to your queries. Email for submissions, suggestions and queries: queerpoetrysouthasia@gmail.com.

This call for submissions will soon be shared in other languages of the subcontinent, including Marathi, Urdu, Kannada, Hindi, Bangla, Malayalam and Tamil. We would love it if you would spread it widely among the poets, amateur and established, in the many queer communities and individuals that you know and love around you. We know pointedly that the two editors of this volume are Indian, Delhi-based and upper-caste, cis-gendered queer poets. However, we want to make a particular effort that this does not constrain the scope of everything that this volume could be. Please help us in making it everything that you envision such a book can be.

Thank you!

Queer Hugs