Call for Creative Submissions: Solidarities

***The deadline for this open call has now passed.***

What shapes do solidarities take in the times we are living in? With the rise of interconnected global fascist forces – and evolving decolonial movements – what practices and strategies can we engage in to further build solidarities between struggles?  

For some, the term solidarity evokes protest, picket lines, and raised fists and voices in the public sphere. For others, it’s what simmers in the kitchen, in workplaces, over telephone calls with family, or increasing frictions at dinner parties. Solidarity can be marred with exhaustion, rage, dissociation, or apathy, too — far from unreasonable reactions to encountering live streamed, often deliberately distorted, images of genocides, human rights violations, and injustices unfolding across every continent.  

Much of our socio-political structures are designed to narrow our struggles into individual vacuums and alienate us from seeing them as brutally enmeshed. In such systems, what can solidarities as communal conversations and actions, and love as radical praxis, offer? How can writers and artists pull us out of our individual and collective numbness, stasis, or despair, and renew, with a life-force, that bittersweet adage (as variously attributed to Emma Lazarus, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Maya Angelou): ‘No one will be free until we are all free’?  

Wasafiri invites creative submissions in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in response to navigating interlinked global systems of oppressions and seeking to forge transnational solidarities across various boundaries. Tell us what it means for you to imagine solidarity and sow kinship between struggles. We invite you to interpret what the term ‘solidarity’ evokes for you — and what it means to be with and for each other in these times.  

Submissions may explore: 

• Responses to government or state disappointment and failures, from bureaucracy to immigration and human rights violations  

• Personal and global acts of protest and protest movements, including political organising  

• Freedom movements across Sudan, the Congo, Palestine, Yemen, Ukraine, Black and indigenous populations, their diasporas, and beyond 

• Historical and literary interventions against genocide and erasure, including work on archives, inequities between languages, and dissident print and publishing cultures  

• Meaningful forms of intersectionality and multilateral movements across feminisms, queer and trans political formations, disability and crip justice   

We are, as ever, interested in work in translation. As Judith Butler reminds us, ‘there can be no solidarity without translation’ — across lands, bodies, culture, and languages. Submissions are also not limited to the themes above; we would like to know how and why solidarities may be (re)defined by you too. 

Visit our Submit page for full details, including word count, format, and fees. We pay writers for all published creative writing. 

Deadline for submissions: 11.59pm BST, Sunday, 24 August, 2025