Call for Manuscripts

What Now?: The Future We Make

 

For our Spring/Summer 2022 issue, What Now?: The Future We Make, Nimrod International Journal invites poems, short stories, creative nonfiction pieces, and translations on the subject of the future we make.

We’ve heard it so often over the last year: We live in unprecedented times. As we write this call for submissions, the world is grappling with the worst pandemic in modern history, urgent calls for racial justice, and challenges to all aspects of the ways that we have lived. In this time of deep change, the question that arises over and over again is: “What now?”

What is also unprecedented is that we have a rare opportunity to pause and question the often unexamined assumptions about the world as it is and as it could be. What do we keep from the past that worked? What do we jettison? What do we enlarge and embrace? The drastic changes to our individual and collective lives call on us to reimagine the future we want. That future is in our hands—our future is the future we make.

We won’t find all the answers here—in fact, we will probably find more questions than answers—but as marine biologist and conservation strategist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson writes, “The more we can envision a world we want to live in, the more we will be inspired to move toward it.” In this issue, we wish to move toward that world and explore its possibilities together.

What We Are Seeking:

We’re looking for work that examines both micro- and macro-versions of the future: both our futures on an individual, relationship, or family level and our social, national, and worldwide future. Here are a few examples of what submissions for this issue might look like.

• Work about changing expectations, from our relationships to our home lives to our occupations to our larger communities
• Work that deals with personal and community trauma—not only how we survive it, but how we surface after disaster, how we find the will and courage to continue
• Work about the environment, climate change, and sustainability
• Work in speculative genres (such as Afrofuturism) actively engaging with future possibilities, both bleak and hopeful
• Work that creates new myths, that reimagines old stories in ways that lead to new and different outcomes
• Work that explores the range and variety of the “we” in the “the future we make”
• Work that projects inclusion, equity, openness, and joy
• Work that explores, meditates on, or engages with any aspect of making the future we want, in unexpected and unique ways.

This list is just to get your ideas flowing; we hope that you will surprise us with additional ideas that we have not thought of about making the future we want.

We are excited about this issue, so please send your work and share this announcement with writing groups, students, and friends. We hope to receive a variety of material for this issue, with interpretations of this theme from writers of all backgrounds and publication histories; we especially welcome work from writers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color, writers of all sexual orientations and gender identities, writers of varying socio-economic status, and writers with physical or mental differences.

The Specifics:

• Fiction and creative nonfiction may be up to 7,500 words; poetry may be up to 7 pages.
• All work must be previously unpublished.
• Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction should be sent as separate submissions.
• Work not originally in English must be translated into English. For work in translation, authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reprint any material under copyright that exceeds the guidelines of fair use or does not have a Creative Commons license.
• Prose should be typed, double-spaced, one side of plain white paper only. Poetry should be typed, one side of plain white paper only, no more than one poem per page.
• For those submitting by mail: Please mark both your cover letter and the outer envelope with “Spring 2022 Theme.” Send a SASE for response. Postal submissions are free.
• For those submitting online: Please submit work online under the theme category at: submittable.com/submit. A $3 fee is charged for online submissions to cover the administrative costs associated with those submissions.
• If the online submission fee or the postage to send work by mail will pose a substantial economic burden, writers may seek a waiver of the fee. To seek a waiver, please email us at nimrod@utulsa.edu with your request and reasons for seeking a waiver.

Manuscripts will be accepted beginning June 1, 2021.

Postmark deadline: November 1, 2021

Publication date: Spring 2022

Payment: $10/printed page with a $200 maximum.

Nimrod is a nonprofit literary magazine published by The University of Tulsa, with issues appearing twice a year. All contributors to the magazine also receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears.

Submit online at: https://nimrodjournal.submittable.com/submit

Send postal manuscripts to:

Nimrod Journal
The University of Tulsa
800 S. Tucker Dr.
Tulsa, OK 74104

Questions: Email nimrod@utulsa.edu

 

Open Submission Categories

 

• Submissions for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers are open through July 15th, 2021.
• Thematic submissions for What Now?: The Future We Make are open through November 1st, 2021.
• General submissions to the magazine are open through November 30th, 2021.