Call for Submissions for our Spring 2026 Collection!

 

Call for Submissions: Letters to Tomorrow (Spring 2026) 

 

To you, dear readers, writers, artists, and creators,

We write to you during a time of great uncertainty, distrust, and division. This malaise is something we all feel yet struggle to articulate. But nonetheless we recognize it as a profound sense of disconnection. This feeling isn’t exactly new; it bubbles up in statements like: “I talk to my friends more in texts than in person,” “I feel like I’m in my own little bubble,” “I want to get involved, but I don’t know how,” and “I can’t be the only one who feels this way.”

 

We launch this call for submissions as a letter to you, dear readers, writers, artists, and creators, to let you know you are not the only one who feels this way, and we invite you to write back. The process toward connection, belonging, and solidarity involve critical moments of self-reflection, a willingness to be honest, to take risks, to be vulnerable, and to comprehend the multitude of ways we are inextricably bound to one another. There is no better way of approaching a collection centered on connection than through letter writing.

 

This collection invites submissions composed as letters. The personal and intimate nature of a letter is generative in a number of ways for both the composer and the recipient, deepening understanding, empathy, and relationality. Letters can also be provocative, even confrontational, but ultimately based on the same exigence: change based on the universally human need for connection. In doing so, letters can be written as things left unsaid,

         To forgive

         To be heard

         To be understood

         To tell a story

         To cope

         To grieve 

         To remember

         To ask important questions

         To celebrate

         To change someone’s mind

         To reach out

Letters are for the general public but addressed to a specific recipient, which can include people you love, like James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, “A Letter to My Son,” which became his book, Between the World and Me. Letters can be written to communities that might benefit from your experiences, such as those found in Kelly Hayes’s new edited collection: Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists In Crisis. Letters can be addressed to yourself, your former or future self, to teachers, coaches, preachers, strangers, neighbors, and friends. Letters can be written to your ancestors. Letters can be addressed more generally, perhaps even metaphorically, to places, animals (living, extinct), environments (rivers, mountains, trees), built environments, and even objects (an instrument, an heirloom, a building). As always, in addition to adhering to the theme of connection, good faith submissions composed with dignity and respect for all people are prerequisites for acceptance.

We invite textual submissions that are either typed or handwritten, by single authors and collaborators. As a multimodal journal, we also welcome submissions that push our understanding of what a letter looks and feels like, including music, visual art of all kinds, poetry, film, and imaginative artistic forms that may combine any of these.

Cover photography

Typically, representations of nature/nonhumans are used as cover art for each collection of the Writing for Change Journal. If you are a regional photographer and you have a photo that you think captures the tone of this collection’s theme, please consider submitting it. (Even outside of the cover art, photography of all kinds are welcomed submissions).