February 24, 2020

Call for Submissions: Queer + Trans Voices

by Nailah Taman | in Literary

Guest edited by Zeyn Joukhadar
!**DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 4/14!**
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS IS NOW CLOSED.

Queer and transgender writers who are Arab, Muslim, and/or of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) heritage have long made significant contributions to the literary canon and the literary community in the United States. Despite marginalization, erasure, and even violence, we have created innovative literary forms and challenged conventions of genre, language, linear conceptions of time, and the cisheteronormative gaze. Though we are still often tasked with proving and justifying our existence along lines of gender, sexuality, race, and faith, we continue to resist and transcend dominant narratives of queer and trans trauma and strict Western notions of “outness” as a measure of legitimacy in order to ask more pressing questions: How do we honor our multiplicity and complexity? How do we talk about bodily autonomy, embodiment, and self-determination in a context in which queer and trans bodies are commodified, scrutinized, medicalized, traumatized, violated, and dehumanized, particularly Black transfeminine bodies? How do we bear witness to our rich history and imagine speculative futures for ourselves that are centered around and honor queerness, transness, Indigeneity, and Blackness? What can we build together when we decenter the cisgender binary, heterosexuality, whiteness, ableism, Amerocentrism, and capitalism?

Mizna welcomes poetry, stories, creative essays, flash fiction, comics, and other literary interpretations of these topics, whether direct or indirect. Submissions from queer and trans writers will be prioritized, as will submissions from Black trans women and Black transfeminine nonbinary writers. As this issue seeks to decenter dominant Western “coming out” narratives that often result in the erasure of queer and trans Muslims and people of color, explicit declaration of LGBTQIAP2S+ identity is not a requirement of submission or acceptance.

Call for Submissions is now closed.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/S&S, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/S&S, 19 May 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.