Call for Submissions: Anthology of 2020
Deadline Jan. 31
2020 was a disaster–we want to hear your story.
MWC Press is asking you for your stories of survival, hope, pain, and labor from 2020.
MWC Press, the imprint of the Midwest Writing Center, seeks contributions to an anthology of creative works titled These Interesting Times: Surviving 2020 in the QC.
What did you survive in 2020? What disasters—personal, communal, national, global—can you bear witness to? We’re not only interested in COVID-19, the derecho and flooding, or the fallout from public protests, economic insecurity, and the nation’s bitterly contentious political landscape; we’re interested in the personal struggles that may have been invisible in the shadow of unprecedented devastation, discord, and fear. Whether you were an essential worker or trapped in lockdown, on the front lines or dealing with something else entirely, tell us about your disaster, and what you did with it. We seek strategies for survival, testimony to resilience, witness to loss, and antidotes to despair.
This print anthology should serve as a historical document, but we are also searching for the best art we can find of any form, with the exception that we ask any visual art submissions to be in black and white.
Some of the sales from the anthology will go to support local organizations through the Quad Cities Disaster Recovery Fund at the Quad City Community Foundation.
We ask that submissions come primarily from our service area (in Iowa: Clinton, Scott, Muscatine counties; in Illinois: Henry, Rock Island, and Mercy counties), though we will accept exceptional submissions outside this area.
Submission guidelines:
poetry: 3 pieces / 5 pages
prose: 4000 words
hybrid/other: 5 pages / 2000 words
visual art: b+w only, 300+ dpi
submit via email: submissions@mwcqc.org
subject: 2020 Submission
*Include all work as attachments*
Accepted File Types – writing: .doc | .docx | .pdf
Accepted File Types – visual: .png | .jpeg
Title for Submission Files: [title.last name.2020sub]
Please send questions to submissions@mwcqc.org or sarah.elgatian@mwcqc.org
