Welcome to Britain: a Call for Poetry and Short Fiction

CivicLeicester is inviting and accepting poems and short fiction on the theme, Welcome to Britain.

We welcome submissions exploring but not limited to:

• images, issues, histories, lives, and demands that are currently in play in Britain today

• daily life in Britain

• reparations for slave trading, the use of slave labour and for benefiting from the slavery system (the extended global system involving plantation labour and slave-produced commodities etc)

• issues that made the Black Lives Matter movement relevant to Britain, the current state of the movement and its possible futures

• responses that engage with, contest and subvert the myths Britain tells about itself

• responses to British politicians' attitudes towards the use of nuclear weapons and their fixation with the idea of pushing 'the button'

• responses to Britain’s role in the current Ukraine-Russian War that go beyond, engage with or challenge the propaganda coming from both sides of the conflict

• responses to how Britain positions itself in the world

• migration, refugee and human rights issues in Britain,  and

• issues affecting racialised and minoritised groups in Britain.

We welcome submissions from writers of all ages, based anywhere in the world. 

 

Please send the poems and/or short fiction to civicleicester@gmail.com by 2pm on Thursday, 8 September 2022.

 

Submission Guidelines

 

● Poems should be 40 lines or less

● Short prose 100 words or less.

● The poems and short prose should be on the theme, Welcome to Britain. 

● Submissions must be in English. In the case of translated work, it is the translator’s responsibility to obtain permission from the copyright holder of the original work.

● If submitting a poem or short prose that has been previously published, please give details of where it has appeared and confirm that you are the copyright holder.

● Ideally submissions will be typed single spaced and submitted either in the body of an email or as a .doc attachment.

● Please include a short biography of 100 words or less. This will be included in the anthology if your poem or short fiction is accepted. 

● You may submit a maximum of three poems or three pieces of short fiction or a combination of poems and short fiction. You do not have to submit all three at the same time, but the editors can only consider a maximum of three submissions.

● We welcome submissions from writers of all ages, based anywhere in the world.

● Please send the poems and short fiction to civicleicester@gmail.com by 2pm on Thursday, 8 September 2022.

CivicLeicester is an indy publisher that uses poetry, video, photography and the arts to highlight conversations. Books we have published include Poetry and Settled Status for All: An Anthology (2022), Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (2020) and Bollocks to Brexit: an Anthology of Poems and Short Friction (2019).

Africans in Ukraine: a Call for Poems, Short Stories and Creative Nonfiction

CivicLeicester is inviting and accepting poems, short stories and creative nonfiction (including memoir, diary entries, chronicles, biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters and other narratives) on the theme, Africans in Ukraine.

We welcome submissions exploring:

• the lived experience of being an African in Ukraine

• what brought Africans to Ukraine

• their lives in Ukraine before the current Ukraine-Russian War

• what happened when the war broke out

• experiences of and flight from the conflict

• the images, issues, histories, lives and demands that Africans in Ukraine are highlighting

• the reception Africans got in neighbouring countries or in their countries of origin, and

• what happens or what should happen next. 

We welcome submissions from writers of all ages, based anywhere in the world. 

We particularly welcome submissions from people of African descent who were living and studying in Ukraine and those who witnessed or are witnessing what this group of people are going through.

 

Please send the poems, short prose and creative nonfiction to civicleicester@gmail.com

The call for submissions will stay open until we have enough material for an anthology.

 

Submission Guidelines

 

● Poems should be 40 lines or less

● Short stories and creative nonfiction 1,500 words or less.

● The poems, short stories and creative nonfiction should be on the theme, Africans in Ukraine.

● Submissions must be in English. In the case of translated work, it is the translator’s responsibility to obtain permission from the copyright holder of the original work.

● If submitting a poem, short story or creative nonfiction that has been previously published, please give details of where it has appeared and confirm that you are the copyright holder.

● Ideally submissions will be typed single spaced and submitted either in the body of an email or as a .doc attachment.

● Please include a short biography of 50 words or less. This will be included in the anthology if your poem, short story or creative nonfiction is accepted. 

● You may submit a maximum of three poems or three pieces of short stories or three pieces of creative nonfiction or a combination of poems, short stories and creative nonfiction. You do not have to submit all three at the same time, but the editors can only consider a maximum of three submissions.

● We welcome submissions from writers of all ages, based anywhere in the world.

● We particularly welcome submissions from people of African descent who were living and studying in Ukraine and those who witnessed or are witnessing what this group of people are going through.

● Please send the poems, short prose and creative nonfiction to civicleicester@gmail.com

● The call for submissions will stay open until we have enough material for an anthology.

 

Notes:

1. What Next for African Students in Ukraine? (Petition)
2. Virginia Pietromarchi. Across Europe, African students fight to study after Ukraine exit. Al Jazeera, 13 May 2022
3. Shamira Ibrahim. Africans In Ukraine: Stories Of War, Anti-Blackness & White Supremacy. Refinery29, 6 March 2022
4. CivicLeicester is an indy publisher that uses poetry, video, photography and the arts to highlight conversations. Books we have published include Poetry and Settled Status for All: An Anthology (2022), Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (2020) and Bollocks to Brexit: an Anthology of Poems and Short Friction (2019). 

This post was updated on 12 December 2022 to remove the deadline for submissions and turn it into an open call.

This post was updated on 23 July 2022 to change the deadline from 14 July 2022 to 24 November 2022.

Poetry and Settled Status for All: Readings and Conversation _ Online Events, February 2022

Writers in the East and West Midlands regions of the UK are organising two online events around the new anthology, Poetry and Settled Status for All (CivicLeicester, 2022): 

● Poems for a Changing World which is taking place online on Thursday, 17 February 2022 (7-8.30pm, UK time), and 

● Poems about Migration, on Friday, 25 February (7.30-8.30pm, UK time).

Both events are free and open to all. 

As part of the events, a number of writers will be reading and talking about their work featured in the anthology. Also speaking at the events are representatives from Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum (17 February) and Shropshire Supports Refugees (25 February).

Introduced by Claudia Webbe, Member of Parliament for Leicester East, Poetry and Settled Status for All presents 114 poems and short prose pieces from 97 writers from around the world exploring themes that include lived experience of migration, refugee and undocumented migrant experiences, and the hostile environment.

The anthology is inspired by and builds on how, around the world, campaigners are asking governments to give Settled Status, Indefinite Leave to Remain and humane pathways to citizenship to all in their jurisdictions who need such status.

Poetry and Settled Status for All is dedicated to "all who have left the place they were born to find home elsewhere, to those who support them, and to peace and community activist extraordinaire Penny Walker (1950-2021)" and features contributions from seasoned writers with many publications to their names alongside emerging voices. 

The anthology has been described variously as “powerful”, “thought-provoking” and “effective”.