One Opportunity for PWD Poets

I'm submitting to this. If you qualify, you should submit, as well. Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett are putting together an anthology of poets with physical disabilities.

We are ideally looking for poets with physical disabilities, although we are not excluding submissions from abled-poets writing about a poet with a physical disability. The format will be 3-5 poems and a short open-ended essay (750- 1000 words). The essay should address how disability manifests itself (or doesn't) in your work. The essay can also discuss identity or anti-identity poetics.

Please send 7-10 poems, a short publishing biography (include your book titles) and an one paragraph description of an essay you would like to write to rejennifer@gmail.com AND sheilablack@hotmail.com.

Deadline July 1st. Also, email with any questions.

Please see the request and description below:

Yet our goal is not to produce a book that is strictly polemical but rather one that looks at poetry first. The spectrum of poets writing on the topic, especially today, articulate disability in specific and surprising ways. While the poets who make up this proposed anthology are poets whose aesthetic lens has been torqued or shaped by their bodies, the group is eclectic as fits the topic—for not only is each disability unique, but even within a single person the experience of disability is a dynamic one.

Some poets we plan to include, while forethinkers in the poetry world, are not known as “disability poets.” Rather, they came to have bodily differences later in life. Some are activists and heavily entrenched in Disability Studies. Others, while not activists, write about their singular experience, in ways that are formally and philosophically challenging. In addition, the poets included represent many different modes and movements in modern poetry. Part of what is so energizing about considering the current landscape of disability poetry is the degree to which thinking about disability enlists or engages viscerally many of the core concerns animating other poetry movements from the New Formalists to the New Sincerity to the Gurlesque. The mediations on the body and commodification, and on the very nature and being of beauty, that drive many of the poets in this collection are concerns that are not only universal, but also acutely urgent in our times.