MQR Mixtape is currently accepting submissions for MQR Mixtape: DANGER, or: Speak Anyway, an issue guest edited by Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng.
Submission deadline: May 31, 2024.
In “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” Edwidge Danticat writes, “to create dangerously” means “to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts.” To contend with the danger of the everyday demands courage and boldness, the doubt notwithstanding. For this issue, MQR Mixtape seeks original, brave, and inventive work that bears witness to and reckons with human peril. We are particularly interested in work that troubles its genre, language, and the very idea of “danger” or speaking. For this issue, we seek honest work that contends with what impels them to stay silent but demands an unsilencing through art. What is the place of humor in works about imperiled lives? What does a dangerous story look like? What does a dangerous essay look like? What is the literary possibility of danger?
We want to know, so please submit:
- Fiction: up to 5,000 words
- Nonfiction: up to 4,500 words
- Poetry: 1–4 poems, up to 6 pages total
- Hybrid work, visual art and/or audiovisual: 250 word abstract and sample
Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted by another publication. Please send only one submission per window; subsequent submissions will be rejected automatically.
Click here to submit to MQR Mixtape: DANGER, or: Speak Anyway.
Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng has published fiction and literary journalism in Joyland, Lolwe, Prairie Schooner and others. Currently a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan, Motsoeneng obtained his MFA in Fiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and studied English and Human Rights Studies at Trinity College. Motsoeneng has been awarded the Avery Hopwood Prize in the Novel, the Frederick Busch Prize, among others. He’s currently working on a novel set in Johannesburg, where he grew up.