Adi is seeking new poetry. Send us your work!

Adi is interested in 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.

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. 

Over the years, poetry has been one of our primary modes of expression and we have published a number of established poets, including Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah, Airea D. Matthews, and Franny Choi. We even ran a whole issue of poets as they took on policy concerns.

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: UP TO 5 POEMS, NO MORE THAN 10 PAGES. Previously unpublished poems only.

If accepted, we pay $150/poem.

The deadline for submissions is MAY 31, though we welcome them earlier. 

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 If you have unpublished work from writers who fit the bill, please get in touch.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).

INFO FOR SUBMITTERS:

• Please send one submission at a time, and please wait until your submission has been accepted or declined before submitting again.
• We do accept simultaneous submissions; please withdraw individual pieces if they are accepted elsewhere.
• Adi does not accept submissions 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.