Call for Submissions: Voices for Social Justice in Education: A Literary Anthology

Editors: Julie Landsman, Rosanna Salcedo, & Paul Gorski

Deadline for submissions: Midnight, January 15th, 2014

What we are looking for: Poetry (including spoken word), creative non-fiction, memoir, short stories, images of visual art, and other types of writing or visual art that paint a picture of what justice and injustice look like in our schools.

Please read this Call for Submissions fully and, if you choose to submit one or more manuscripts, email them as Word documents, following the specifications below, to: voices@edchange.org.

Stories make meaning for us. We can read “scholarly” articles, abstract theories, or collections of research and all of this is important. However, it is the stories, the poems, the music, the memoir, the essays, the fiction, that bring to life all of the information, all of the declarations about what is good, what is not working, what is needed. In this Voices for Social Justice in Education anthology we desire writing that brings the reality of schooling to life. We want poems about 3rd period physics, short stories about recess in the second grade one hot spring afternoon. We want memoir about your best and worst teachers. We want essays about what is working now, at this moment, in your classroom—what makes a difference in the lives of your students, what is making your school a place students want to be or don’t want to be. We want to know in vivid language, be it from memories or journal entries, in the form of spoken word or in a carefully constructed short story, what social justice means in schools today. What are your hopes and how do they play out? What matters to you when you walk in the door of your building, when you stand up in front of class, when you are late for your last class of the day?

We are writers ourselves. We love language and we know how powerful it can be, how it can move people, to reach those who can make change. We want your words, your language, your passion to help provoke that change.

Guidelines and Specifications for Contributors:
(1) Poets may submit up to 5 poems at once; please submit each in a separate document with your full contact information on each one (see #4 below)
(2) Prose writers may submit up to 15 pages
a) Times New Roman 12-pt font
b) Double-spaced
(3) Images of visual art should be submitted in .pdf or .jpg format
(4) Include author/artist name(s) and email address(es) on each piece submitted
(5) Remember, we are looking for work explicitly about social justice in education and schools, so great work about social justice that is not explicitly relevant to education schools will not be considered

Please feel free to share this Call for Submissions widely!