Call For Poetry for Disabilty Poetry Anthology

Poets Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett are putting together an anthology of
poets with physical disabilities. Below is their call for poems and essays.

We are ideally looking for poets with physical disabilities, although we are
not excluding submissions from abled-poets writing about a poet with a
physical disability. The format will be 3-5 poems and a short open-ended
essay (750- 1000 words). The essay should address how disability manifests
itself (or doesn't) in your work. The essay can also discuss identity or
anti-identity poetics.

Please send 7-10 poems, a short publishing biography (include your book
titles) and a one paragraph description of an essay you would like to write
to rejennifer@gmail.com AND sheilablack@hotmail.com.

Deadline July 1st. Also, email with any questions.

Please see the request and description below:

Yet our goal is not to produce a book that is strictly polemical but rather
one that looks at poetry first. The spectrum of poets writing on the topic,
especially today, articulate disability in specific and surprising ways. While
the poets who make up this proposed anthology are poets whose aesthetic lens
has been torqued or shaped by their bodies, the group is eclectic as fits
the topic—for not only is each disability unique, but even within a single
person the *experience *of disability is a dynamic one. Some poets we plan
to include, while forethinkers in the poetry world, are not known as
“disability poets.” Rather, they came to have bodily differences later in
life. Some are activists and heavily entrenched in Disability Studies.
Others, while not activists, write about their singular experience, in ways
that are formally and philosophically challenging. In addition, the poets
included represent many different modes and movements in modern poetry. Part
of what is so energizing about considering the current landscape of disability
poetry is the degree to which thinking about disability enlists or engages
viscerally many of the core concerns animating other poetry movements from
the New Formalists to the New Sincerity to the Gurlesque. The mediations on
the body and commodification, and on the very nature and being of beauty,
that drive many of the poets in this collection are concerns that are not
only universal, but also acutely urgent in our times.