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P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, F=Fiction
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P – Adi Magazine’s Spring 2025 Open Call for Poetry on the Theme: Alternative political visions for a world in desperate need of them
Adi is interested in thinking about alternative political visions for a world in desperate need of them. We want examples from outside of the mainstream, stories about practices, ideas, and movements that were/are suppressed by economic, socio-cultural, religious, or imperial (colonial) powers. We privilege perspectives from the Global South, always interested in how we might reorient our political universe towards those organic alliances, intertwined liberation theologies, grassroots movements, and revolutionary philosophers. But we are also interested in the experiences of all marginalized peoples everywhere as they have explored alternative economies, subversive strategies, and surprising solidarities. Pieces could be based on historical events, or could focus on imagined futures that subvert current empires.
In the words of James Baldwin, “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.” What realignments, restorations, revisions and resurrections might we uncover and foster with the stars aflame?
Please interpret this call expansively and imaginatively. Familiarize yourself with the range and spirit of our archives; Adi tends toward creative, experimental approaches to political writing, measuring the effects of policy through the intimate lives and experiences of people with a particular focus on those on the margins and in the Global South.
We do not want dreary political agitprop. We love work that bends genres, that embraces the absurd, that excavates interior lives alongside external conflicts. Send us work that analyzes, satirizes, fabulizes, and fantasizes, that disturbs, beguiles, moves, challenges, surprises, and ignites.
SUBMISSION LIMIT: UP TO 5 POEMS, NO MORE THAN 10 PAGES. Previously unpublished poems only.
If accepted, we pay $150/poem.