Call for Submissions: Adapt This City

From Slag Glass City, a nonfiction literary journal of the urban essay arts:

Announcing a special call for submissions: Adapt This City. Nonfiction prose, photography, and hybrid works submitted for this call are accepted from November 5, 2019—February 5, 2020.

Creative nonfiction selected for publication by the 2020 editorial board will be published in the online journal and promoted broadly, as well as considered for publication in the annual miniature print edition.

Here in the Slag Glass City we want to see stories, arguments, lyrics, and reports about 21st century cities transforming, in tiny or tremendous ways. We welcome fresh takes and variations including: mosaic, montage, photographs, soundscape, drawing, image + text, video, audio, and/or hybridity. We have no length requirements and will consider prose from short-short/flash to longform.

As rising shorelines consume cities, as displacement guts neighborhoods, as immigrant families fear deportation raids, as city dwellers fight epic battles for rent control and public school teachers strike, as desert cities burn and hurricanes blow ocean cities off their foundations, how are we adapting? Can the contemporary metropolis adjust to cataclysmic change—the urgent and the everyday, the systemic and the intimate? When we do adapt, who benefits, who pays, and how is the city implicated? Can the old city adapt into the city we need now, without leaving anyone behind?

Write us a city bent on survival.

Submit all work to our special submission portal: https://tinyurl.com/SlagGlassAdaptations. (Visual artists should submit low resolution samples, or contact us to share work too large for the Submittable portal.)

Regular submissions are still open October-June. Slag Glass City considers nonfiction prose, graphic narrative, video, audio, soundscape, photography, mixed media, or any other form of essay arts. The prose cannot be previously published, including on author blogs, but visual art may appear on artist’s sites. We are unable to pay contributors, but artists retain all rights, we promote widely, and all work published stays “in-print” online.

Slag Glass City is a magazine of essay arts, textual burlesque, and post-industrial forms, edited by Barrie Jean Borich. Published at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, we are an international creative nonfiction and multidisciplinary media journal engaged with sustainability, identity, and art in urban environments. The living city is broken and blooming. How will our roof gardens grow?

If you have QUESTIONS please email this address: slagglasscity@gmail.com

Image by Carlos ZGZ