Most events are installed on their deadline date, unless there is a long submission window or unless it's a rolling submission.
P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, F=Fiction
For this issue we invite work that traces the edges of intimacy and illusion. We seek longing projected across distance, the distortions of connection, and the gifts of being alongside – with or without perception and recognition.
We are looking for queer protagonists in any setting or genre where the narrative fits any of the above themes (defiance, survival, hope, love).
For this issue, we are open exclusively for our BIPOC Writers project.
Send us your strangest, sexiest, thirstiest, poems that, broadly speaking, fit with or interrogate the theme of queer pastoral.
Send us your beautiful wreckage, your quiet detonations, your elaborate ruses, and your betrayals of self. We’ll be listening for the sound of gears grinding, the machinery silenced.
Send us your poems of insomnia, moonlight, shadows, and dreams…
Submit a poem/flash prose of 30 lines/200 words (or less) responding to one of our four prompts.
How can slowness, reciprocity, and rest operate as radical acts of survival?
We invite pieces that capture the spirit of Aurora: radiant, reflective, and full of gentle transformation.
We're looking for fiction and poetry about the people who work in airports and for airlines, such as passenger service agents, ramp agents, TSA agents, airport engineers, baggage handlers, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, pilots, and so on.
What does butch-femme mean in lesbian and queer communities today?
Taken on its own, “gibbous” represents a concept still in the works, under construction, nearly-there. Perhaps this is what it means to live in a gibbous phase of the decade: something swollen, marked by tension and possibility.
We’re looking for all kinds of poetry on the theme of Hunger. As always, we encourage you to bend the rules with both content and form.
Homemade and handmade—crafting a life.
What influences exist in your life? What or who has made you who you are? Who have you influenced?
Although the essay holds the central role at DPA, we are open to other genres, including experimental, poetry and flash non-fiction, as long as there is a first-person point of view.
Send us work that navigates this dystopia, this manipulation; these reversals. Work that traverses the wastelands of distortion.
In an age of fractured focus, how do we attend—to each other, to the world, to the overlooked?
Poems should engage with the craft, joy, or obsession of writing poetry. Work can be meta, self-reflective, or whimsical, highlighting the relationship between poet, poem, and (if applicable) reader.
For this contest, write a story in which someone or something has returned after a significant absence.