Poets and poetry organizations everywhere are responding to the election results. Just this past week twenty nonprofits including the Academy of American Poets, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Canto Mundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Letras Latinas, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America joined in solidarity “to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities.” The newly formed Poetry Coalition maintains “It is through reading, writing, and discussing poems that we learn about one another on our most human level, inspiring empathy, compassion, and greater understanding of one another.” Individual poets are speaking out as well, and various literary magazines are soliciting responses to Trump’s election.
Given the platform our president-elect ran on, and given The Good Men Project‘s mission and values, we are interested in doing a poetry series on immigration and xenophobia. Poems can approach one or both of these topics in any way the writer sees fit. Everybody will be welcome to submit work, but we of course want to hear especially from people who have been directly affected by or who are in a position to be directly affected by these issues–people of color, immigrants and their family and friends, those who have faced incarceration or deportation, and so forth.
If you are interested in participating, please access our special submission manager to submit up to 5 poems. The current deadline for submissions is January 31st.
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