Adi is thinking about alternative political visions for a world in desperate need of them.

I will no longer lightly walk behind 

a one of you who fear me

—June Jordan

We are living through a moment of acute political, social, economic, and environmental retrenchment across the globe, and it’s hard not to succumb to a feeling of powerlessness. But we know that, as Saidiya Hartman has shared, “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.” 

So at Adi we are giving our imaginations free rein to combat political ennui and nihilism. We know that narratives themselves have power: the ability to build alliances and strategies, the capacity to foster hope for change, and the power to remake the ways we understand our world in the past, present, and future. 

We are looking for pieces about practices, ideas, and movements that were/are suppressed by economic, socio-cultural, religious, or (neo)colonial powers. We privilege perspectives from the global majority—people of color, queer people, all marginalized peoples—as they reflect on how politics and policies influence their daily lives. We are always interested in exploring how we might reorient our political universe toward those organic alliances, intertwined liberation theologies, grassroots movements, and revolutionary philosophies. 

But we are also excited by writing that explores alternative economies, subversive strategies, and surprising solidarities. Pieces could be based on historical events; grounded in contemporary, lived realities; or focused on imagined futures that subvert the current status quo. While the dominant voices in the media are focused on men in suits and geopolitics, we are trying to tell fresh stories and pulling perspectives from the margins to the center. Our editorial sensibilities are channeling Toni Morrison’s strategy for dealing with a monolithic literary world in which she was an outlier: “I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn’t afraid to show it.”

What kinds of stories might we tell, and what kinds of communities might we foster, if we stop being afraid to tell our own stories, real or imagined? 

As always, please interpret this call expansively and imaginatively. Familiarize yourself with the range and spirit of our archive; Adi tends toward creative, experimental approaches to political writing, measuring the effects of policy through the personal lives and direct experiences of people.

We shun dreary agitprop but love work that bends genres, that embraces the absurd, that excavates interior lives alongside external conflicts. Send us your best work that analyzes, satirizes, critically 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 MARCH 31, 2026. 

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).  

 NOTES FOR SUBMISSION:

• We do not publish work that has been previously published in English. (We do occasionally publish work that has been previously published by small presses in other languages.)
• Adi acquires first exclusive, world English-language publication rights but the copyright always remains with the author.
• Please send one submission at a time, and please wait until your submission has been accepted or declined before submitting again. Additional submissions will be rejected automatically.
• We do accept simultaneous submissions; please withdraw immediately if your story is accepted elsewhere.
• Adi does not accept submissions or pitches generated with AI. 
• Adi does not tolerate hate speech or discriminatory language of any kind.

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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.