May 29, 2021

Call for Submissions: The Experimental Issue

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Literary

Note: Submissions for the Experimental Issue are now closed

Call for submissions for Mizna: The Experimental Issue, Winter 2021. Due August 20, 2021.

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.

For our winter 2021 issue, guest-edited by Tarik Dobbs, we are seeking works that challenge conventional forms, language, and ideas within the literary process. Experimental works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, comics, and mixed print genres will all be considered.

Mizna has a long history of publishing experimental works. In this issue, we are interested in focusing specifically on questions related to forms and concepts within and without literary tradition. In what ways do our ideas resist the prescribed page? How can we present them? What if we don’t want a new model, but rather the end of written models? What happens when we think outside of what is outside-the-box? What will we hold onto? What leaves us, and what stays?

We are open to possibilities of developing new forms and concepts, to being challenged and, to being surprised by quality, insightful, and thought-provoking work. Is there still room on the page for something we haven’t seen before? 

Some examples of experimental writing forms include: visual poetry; flash fiction; creative nonfiction; collage; erasure, dialogues, lists, text art, code; works that play with point-of-view, switch perspectives, the use of an unexpected voice, works that sit in an unconventional space on the page, poems that deliberately break tradition, stories written in one sentence, a memoir written about one second.

Contributors do not need to identify as of Arab/SWANA descent, provided their work is of relevance to or in dialogue with the social realities of the SWANA/Arab region or community. Contributors may also decide to expand this reality altogether. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, though we ask to be notified as soon as possible if the submission is accepted elsewhere.

Up to 10 pages, up to 2000 words, no minimum. Submissions due August 20, 2021.

Please email us with any submissions questions at mizna@mizna.org

Tarik Dobbs is an Arab American queer writer and text artist born in Dearborn, Michigan. Visual poems by Dobbs can be found in American Poetry Review, Best of the Net, & Poetry Magazine. Dobbs edits at Poetry.onl and is a writer-in-residence at InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. Dobbs’s poetry chapbook, Dancing on the Tarmac, was selected by G. Calvocoressi (Yemassee, 2021).