Open Call | Contamination
Ends on
In connection with the Editorial Fellowship at A Public Space, we are pleased to announce an open call for a special portfolio in the magazine to be edited by Yasmin Bashir.
Contamination
Like finger-sucking in public, contamination can be alluring. The act of being made impure. For this open call I am seeking writing across genres. Writing that is mischievous in tone, difficult to digest; not necessarily explicit but coarse. Submissions might consider: What political, aesthetic, or technological systems demand our purity? How do we use art to resist this demand? What happens when we layer language across and against itself rather than organize it? What emerges when we abandon cleanliness in favor of friction, seepage, or mess?
Eligibility: Only writers who have not yet published or been contracted to write a book-length work with a U.S. publisher are eligible. Writers who have self-published, published an academic text, published a book with a publisher outside the U.S., or translated another writer’s work are eligible to apply. Writers who have published a chapbook in the U.S. are ineligible to apply. International applicants are encouraged to apply. Work that incorporates multiple languages is eligible, so long as the primary language is English. Only one submission per person is allowed. A Public Space reserves the right to invite submissions.
Timeline: Submissions will be accepted via Submittable from July 14, 2025–July 28, 2025. Submissions close at 11:59 p.m. (ET) on July 28. All submissions will receive a reply by the end of August.
Submission Requirements: Submissions are only accepted through Submittable. There is no submission fee. Please submit the following:
— A cover letter, including a short biographical statement and
— One previously unpublished piece up to 6,000 words, double-spaced, or up to five (5) poems.
— Simultaneous submissions are allowed.
Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Please do not include your cover letter as part of your manuscript.
Questions? Write Editorial Fellow Yasmin Bashir at yasmin@apublicspace.org
Recommended Reading: Below are selections from A Public Space’s archive that were among my references in developing this open call. These pieces are part of this month’s Public Access—work from the magazine’s archive, made free and open to all. I’ve included some pieces from elsewhere as well.
Mónica de la Torre
Thank you for allowing me this public intimacy. I’m intrigued by the you I’ve conjured here. You keep haunting these words.
Jordana Maisie
Typically, surface is understood as the outward appearance, but like the wall, surface is not an independent element. It has thickness, and this thickness is both physical and metaphorical.
“Tongue Out (Beginning with a Line by the Painter Francis Bacon)”
Robert Fernandez
As if I’d drunk deeply at the roulette wheel / And bathed in its multicolored fogs, / As if I’d sweated through my shirt / Next to the colossal/Stones of the casino fireplace.
“Tipping”
LaToya Watkins
I’m full of tears and bile. That’s all I got.
D.A. Powell
Silent the approach, a fawn, fluid through the damp grass, the current in the full creek surrounding the mossy rocks, pulling them a spell a little ways downstream, inevitable their deposit.
FROM ELSEWHERE
“Ash Wednesday” by Samuel R. Delany
from Boston Review
The clean, clear ending that society keeps looking for is impossible to find. New kinds of social formations are always growing up, even within the most rigid that already seem to contain us.
“Lotion” by Simone White
from Harper’s Magazine
On my knees now, I perform an act of penitence; in that this dirt has been discovered and named and pointed to, I am humiliated; in that suggestions have been made regarding the method of its eradication too I am humiliated.