Call for Work: Until You Get Here, Queer Epistolaries
For six years and counting, we — Jody and Zoë — have been sending each other love notes: epistolary poems, long form emails with subject lines like “sexy and dorky and overflowing and gay,” texts about magnolia blooms and puppy toe beans, many selfies, one renga, and a lot of Audre Lorde.
We met via a virtual writing workshop in 2018; we have yet to meet in person. This queer bloom of a friendship — perennial yet distanced, intimate yet nebulous — is part of a long-standing tradition. Queer folks have been keeping each other company on the page for as long as we’ve existed — as a way to practice solidarity, to extend generosity, to resist, to wonder, to gossip, to flirt, to nurture kinship beyond borders and categories.
These exchanges hold space for something essential in our intimacies. As Madeleine Cravens writes, “The ‘you’ of the letter poem is never universal. It is vivid, particular, and far-off. It follows that the epistolary poem itself has an urgent function: it must bridge a gap.”
To us, the queer epistolary is a reverent space: a gap in which to witness each other’s vivid, unruly particularities. A bridge between articulation and action. An intimacy that can hold fear and anger and the exhaustion of trying, so that we may, in turn, meet each other off the page, in struggle. Queer as in making room for reverence and revolutionary insistence, both.
In the spirit of that mess and togetherness, here are some examples of queer epistolaries we’re reading:
- – June Jordan’s letters to Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, grappling with Zionism, the rifts it caused in their friendships, Jordan’s uncompromising commitment to Palestinian life and liberation
- – Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s email correspondences, two lightning weeks of courtship via commentary on touch, gender, media and culture, sex, philosophy
- – Claudia Jones’ odes to friends and comrades, speaking directly via poetry to women in prison, in Communist organizations, in anti-colonial movements around the world
- – George Abraham and Sarah Aziza’s exchange of kinship, wit(h)ness, love, from within the reach of ongoing personal and collective apocalypse
- – Bahar Orang’s profound meditation on beauty, medicine, an address to the beloved, a footnote to the universe about the edges of things
For this folio, we want all of your reaches across space and time. What exchanges are you tending to? Which elders or ancestors breathe with you on and off the page? What love letters to comrades have you penned recently? What open letters to the collective? We want all of your queer bridges.
We are particularly interested in entanglement, collaborative dreaming, decolonial and co-constituted world building, odes to other-than-human kin, and eco-queer futures. We are interested in the ways epistolary forms can speak back to power, to create just and joyful worlds on the page, and get to the mess, the conflict, too. We want your flirts, your offerings, your tips, your tea. We want it all — all your love, in all its forms.
in care and solidarity,
Zoë & Jody
Forms we welcome: poems, essays, emails, texts, voice notes, collages, songs, handwritten notes/cards, photos and image descriptions — any form your correspondences take. These can be duets, collectives, group chats, or solos (aka, collaborations welcome but not necessary).
Deadline: March 15, 2025
Email: [email protected]
Calls for Submissions
Thank you for liking us enough to submit! We’re grateful that you’re considering us as a home for your work. For our regular issue, we accept submissions through our Submittable platform only.
We do not accept AI-generated or AI-assisted prose or art. AI-assisted poetry (think Lillian-Yvonne Bertram) may be sent in so long as it is clarified in the cover letter that AI-based technologies were employed. We do not consider generative AI poetry.
General submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and translation are open October 1 – February 1 and May 1 – August 1.
For submissions to our special folios, published in and between regular issues, submissions are accepted under the terms stipulated in the folio call, determined by and at the discretion of the guest folio editor, in consultation with our staff folio editor. For current folio calls, see the bottom of this page.
To cover operational costs, we must charge a $3 fee for each submission. If, for reasons of financial hardship, you cannot afford to pay the submission fee, please send us an email at editor at anomalouspress dot org.
We strongly encourage you to take a look at http://www.anmly.org to see previous issues and see if you think your work is a good fit.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that you notify us immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere. You can use this handy system to withdraw, or leave a note on your submission.
We only consider previously unpublished work. That includes work published on personal blogs, sorry. We’re especially interested in work that uses the medium of the web as part of its compositional strategy.
We aim for a two-month response time, but we’re only human. Because we’re an all-volunteer organization we try our very best to offer a fair turnaround time, about three months. For any genre other than poetry please drop us a line if you haven’t heard from us within three months. For poetry submissions, we can’t respond to individual inquiries: if you haven’t heard from us yet, it’s because we’re still working on your submission. We get over 500 poetry submissions every period and are spending time reading each one carefully.
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Call for Blog & Feature Writers
We’re looking for writers who are interested in contributing in an ongoing manner to the ANMLY Blog, either by proposing a column or series, or by joining a team of staff writers who both pitch and take on assigned pieces for the blog. We are particularly interested in writers to focus on reviews, interviews, and profiles of artists and writers; and in getting pitches for columns or series that focus specifically on a particular artistic or writing community within the purview of our expanded mission. If you are interested, please send an email to Features & Reviews Editor Addie Tsai with a paragraph about what you’re interested in writing.
Call for Folio Proposals
ANMLY features special sections, that we call folios, in each issue, and between issues. To propose a theme or topic for an upcoming folio, please submit a brief, 500-word description, making sure to specify what genres will be included in the content of your folio, and the names of some potential contributors (you do not need to already have content selected, just a few names as examples!).
Folios proposals are accepted and reviewed on an ongoing basis. To propose a folio, please send an email to Folio Editor Gillian Joseph.