Adi is seeking new short fiction. Send us your unpublished work!
Adi is 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’ve previously published fiction on ghosts in a post-fossil fuel world; intervention through the eyes of a fugitive lion; healthcare bureaucracy and restrictions on reproductive rights; the reimagination of the myth of the faceless woman; and a family's decision on citizenship while facing an American apocalypse.
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: 5,000 words. One unpublished submission per author, please.
For short fiction, up to 5,000 words, payment is $500.
For flash fiction, under 1,000 words, payment is $200.
The deadline for submissions is MAY 4th.
Translators: we’d love to hear from you, too! If you have unpublished work from writers who fit the bill, please get in touch. (If the story’s already been translated, just go ahead and submit, but if not, feel free to email us with a blurb about the potential story and we’ll take it from there).
Adi does not accept submissions generated with AI.
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Adi is a feminist literary journal of global politics. Founded in 2019, we’ve published new work from such writers as Tracy K. Smith, Nadifa Mohamed, Meena Kandasamy, Evie Shockley, Terese Mailhot, K-Ming Chang, and Rafia Zakaria. Named after a Tamil word with three meanings—protest, intervention, and violence—Adi’s aim is to platform political writing rooted in lived experience and a commitment to inventiveness, both formally and conceptually.