Willow Books is pleased to announce a new competition. In honor of the Idlewild community, a 100-year old black community that celebrated luminaries in the arts, business and sports, the Idlewild Writers Competition honors excellent work by black writers. This year's competition is for fiction and poetry.
Winners receive $500 and an excerpt of the winning work will be published in the Continuum anthology. Payment is upon publication.
Fiction: Submit short stories or novellas no longer than 70,000 words
Poetry: Submit up to 80 pages.
NOMMO Anthology
Poets and writers are invited to submit work to our new anthology. We accept all genres of work, including poetry, fiction drama and experimental, as long as it has Afrofuturism as the focus. Some definitions include:
"Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future and alternate realities through a Black cultural lens. Black cultural lens means the people of the African continent in addition to the Diaspora, the Americas, Europe, etc. It is an artistic aesthetic, but also a kind of method of self-liberation or self-healing. It can be part of critical race theory and in other respects its an epistemology as well. It intersects the imagination, technology, Black culture, liberation, and mysticism. An an artistic aesthetic it bridges literature, music, visual arts, film, and dance. As a mode of self-healing and self-liberation, it's the use of imagination that is most significant because it helps people to transform their circumstances. Imagining oneself in the future creates agency and it's significant because historically people of African descent were not always incorporated into many of the storylines about the future."--Ytasha Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture (2013).
Poetry: Submit no more than three poems
Fiction/Nonfiction/Drama: Submit no more than 3,500 words
Contributors whose work have been accepted will be notified via email.
Payment is one copy of the anthology.
Contributors will be invited to readings for the anthology.
The editorial team reserves the right to reject a submission for any reason.