Calling all LGBTI Creative Writers

Q-zine, Issue 6: Call for Submissions

African writers started “talking back” to empire in the 1950s, but for a long time LGBTI African writers did not join the conversation. Now that is changing. The explosion of the internet and social media in Africa has had a lot to do with this. Internet access is growing more quickly here than anywhere else and is opening up an unlimited new space for queer Africans to interact.

Up to now, most African LGBTI writers have focused, understandably, on activism. There hasn’t been a lot of room for imaginative writing. Now that too is beginning to change. At least two print collections of African LGBTI creative writing are in preparation, and there are some great new creative blogs.

Q-zine (www.issuu.com/q-zine) is the only online magazine of African LGBTI arts and culture. We have been online since September 2011. All material is published in both French and English and republished on our website (www.q-zine-org).

Q-zine Issue 6, online December 2012, will be a special issue devoted entirely to African LGBTI creative writing. For this special issue, we are particularly interested in short stories, excerpts from novels in progress, poetry, and memoirs, but book and theatre reviews, personal essays, and profiles of/interviews with young African LGBTI authors are also welcome. We would also like to include some visual pieces such as photo-essays and graphic narratives.

Issue 6 will be co-edited by Q-zine lead editor John McAllister and award-winning Nigerian novelist Unoma Azuah. Please send your original, previously unpublished submissions in either English or French to the co-editors at: mkonommoja@gmail.com or unomaazuah@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions: October 15,  

The Sillerman First Book Prize

for African Poets

The African Poetry Series has been made possible through seed funding from philanthropists, Laura and Robert F. X. Sillerman, whose generous contributions have facilitated the establishment of the African Poetry Book Fund.  Mr. and Mrs. Sillerman have also welcomed the use of their name for the First Book Prize for African Poets.

Prizes

The winner receives USD $1000 and publication through with the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal.

Eligibility

The Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets will only accept “first book” submissions from African writers who have not published a book-length poetry collection. This includes self-published books if they were sold online, in stores, or at readings. Writers who have edited and published an anthology or a similar collection of other writers’ work remain eligible.

An “African writer” is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, who is a national or resident of an African country, or whose parents are African.

Only poetry written in English is eligible. Translated poetry is accepted but a percentage of the prize will be awarded to the translator.

No past or present paid employees of the University of Nebraska Press or Amalion Press, or current faculty, students, or employees at the University of Nebraska, are eligible for the prizes.

When to Send

Manuscripts are accepted annually between September 15 and November 15.

Manuscript

Poetry manuscripts should be at least 50 pages long.

The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript. All entries will be read anonymously. Please include a cover page listing only the title of the manuscript (not the author’s name, address, telephone number, or email address). An acknowledgements page listing the publication history of individual poems may be included, if desired. No application forms are necessary. You may submit more than one manuscript.

The Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets accepts electronic submissions ONLY. Click here or the button below to submit via Submittable.

Entry Fee

Free

Notification

The winner is announced on the African Poetry Book Fund website on or before January 1. Results are emailed shortly thereafter.

Please send any questions to psbookprize@unl.edu

 

Submit

Sillerman Prize Submissions

Electronic Submissions via Submittable

THE BRUNEL UNIVERSITY

AFRICAN POETRY PRIZE
__________________________________________________

(The Prize is now open for entries. See rules.)

Press Release                                                                   July 2012

The Brunel University African Poetry Prize is a major new poetry prize of £3000 aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa. The prize is sponsored by Brunel University and partnered by Commonwealth Writers, the Africa Centre UK, and the African Poetry Book Fund USA.

British-Nigerian writer, Bernardine Evaristo, who has initiated the prize, describes her reasons for a new prize exclusively devoted to African poetry:

‘I have judged several prizes in the past few years, including chairing the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2012, an award that has revitalised the fortunes of fiction from Africa since its inception in 1999. It became clear to me that poetry from the continent could also do with a prize to draw attention to it and to encourage a new generation of poets who might one day become an international presence. I am particularly interested in new voices who are exploring poetry that perhaps draws on the poets’ own cultural aesthetics – doing something original, something different. African poets are rarely published in Britain. I hope this prize will introduce exciting new poets to Britain’s poetry editors.’

Prairie Schooner, one of the leading literary presses in the USA, having published continuously for eighty-five years, has committed to publishing some of the work of the winning poets of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Wasafiri, the leading British journal of international writing, will also publish the winner. Similar arrangements will be pursued with other major literary journals in the United Kingdom and the US.

Rules in brief. (See Rules)

The prize is open to poets who were born in Africa, or who are nationals of an African country, or whose parents are African.

The prize is for ten poems exactly in order to encourage serious poets. Therefore ten poems exactly have to be submitted in order to be eligible for this prize. These poems may, however, have been published. Only poets who have not yet had a full-length poetry book published are eligible. (Poets who have self-published poetry books or had chapbooks and pamphlets published are allowed to submit for this prize.)

Only poetry written in English is eligible. Translated poetry is accepted but a percentage of the prize will be awarded to the translator.

The prize will open for entries on 1st September 2012 to 30th November 2012. The winner will be announced at the end of April 2013.

There will be a distinguished panel of judges including the poet Kwame Dawes and the academic Mpalive Msiska. There will also be an advisory committee. All to be announced.

In collaboration with the African Poetry Book Fund, the Brunel University African Poetry Prize will develop a series poetry workshops and courses in Africa in its efforts to provide technical support for poets writing in Africa.

For more updates and additional information stay tuned to this website or contact Bernardine Evaristo at Bernardine.Evaristo@brunel.ac.uk. Additional information about the Brunel University African Poetry Prize will be available at the website of the African Poetry Book Fund, http://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/.

The African Poetry Book Fund

Bernardine Evaristo and the Ghanaian-Jamaican writer, editor and academic, Kwame Dawes, first worked together in 1995. When they discovered two months ago that they were both launching African poetry prizes, they decided to combine their efforts and resources. Kwame Dawes has just set up the African Poetry Book Fund, established at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Fund will incorporate the establishment of the new African Poetry Book Series, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal, and the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. The fund will also incorporate the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.

Brunel University

Brunel University is a public research university located in London, winner of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2011 for Higher and Further Education. The university has seen phenomenal rises in the recent university ranking guides. In the first Times Higher Education guide to the top 100 universities founded in the last 50 years, Brunel is placed 1^st in London, 6^th in the UK, and 35^th internationally. English and Creative Writing have been ranked in the top quartile of the Guardian University Guide 2013.  www.brunel.ac.uk

Commonwealth Writers

Commonwealth Writers is a new cultural programme within the Commonwealth Foundation which develops, connects, and inspires writers. By awarding prizes and running on the ground activities, it works in partnership with international literary organisations, the wider cultural industries and civil society to help writers develop their craft in the fifty four countries of the Commonwealth. wwwcommonwealthwriters.org is a forum where members from anywhere in the world can exchange ideas and contribute to debates. www.commonwealthwriters.org

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of six books of fiction and verse fiction including Lara, The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots. Her latest novel will be published by Penguin UK in Spring 2013. An editor and literary critic for the national newspapers, she teaches creative writing at Brunel University. As an advocate for poets of colour, she initiated the Free Verse report and The Complete Works mentoring schemes to develop poets of colour to publication in the UK – with Spread the Word writing agency. She has judged many leading literary awards and in 2012 she was Chair of both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Caine Prize for African Fiction. Winter 2012 she is Guest Editor of Poetry Review, Britain’s leading poetry journal. She has won several literary awards, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts and she was made an MBE in 2009.  www.bevaristo.com

Kwame Dawes is an award winning poet, novelist, playwright, anthologist, musician and critic and the author of over thirty-five books, including sixteen books of poetry, the most recent being, Wheels, (Peepal Tree Press 2011).  He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a faculty member of the Pacific MFA program in Oregon.  His many awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, an Emmy for his reporting on HIV AIDS in Jamaica, the Barnes and Nobles Writers for Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Associate Poetry Editor of Peepal Tree Press and co-founder and Program Director of Calabash International Literary Festival.   His collection Duppy Conqueror, New and Selected Poems will be published by Copper Canyon in 2013.  http://www.kwamedawes.com/ 

Queer African Reader

May 17, 2012 By Sokari 

Queer African Reader

Edited by Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas

 

 A visionary work melding academia and art that breaks the mould for Queer African studies

 Unique in presenting the voices of LGBTI Africans

 Groundbreaking in both scope and content, it encompasses voices from across the African content

 

As the double jeopardy of homophobia and transphobia, and western imperialism, threaten to silence the voices of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, the Queer African Reader is a testament to the resistance and unrelenting power of these communities across Africa and her Diaspora.  The Queer African Reader brings together academic writings, political analysis, life testimonies, conversations and artistic works by Africans that engage with the struggle for LGBTI liberation.

The book aims to engage the audience from the perspective that various axes of identity – gender, race, class and others – interact to contribute to social inequality. It includes experiences from diverse African contexts and breaks away from the homogenisation of Africa as the homophobic continent to highlight the complexities of LGBTI lives and experiences through their own voices.

Contributions from across the continent explore issues of identity, resistance, solidarity, pinkwashing, global politics, intersections of struggle, religion and culture, community, sex and love.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Section 1 

1. A Story
   David Kato

2. In sisterhood and solidarity: queering African feminist spaces
   Awino Okech

3. Postcolonial discourses of queer activism and class in Africa
   Lyn Ossome

4. Contesting narratives of queer Africa
   Sokari Ekine

5. The single story of ‘African homophobia’ is dangerous for LGBTI activism
   Sibongile Ndashe

6. Twice Removed: African Invisibility in Western Queer Theory
   Douglas Clarke

7. Queerying Borders: An Afrikan Activist Perspective
   Bernedette Muthien

8. Don’t be afraid to let me change
   Mia Nikasimo

9. On the Paradoxical Logic of Intersections: A Mathematical Reading of the Reality of Homosexuality in Africa
   Charles Gueboguo

10. Proudly African and transgender
    Gabrielle Le Roux
    
    

Section 2 

1. The face I love: Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases
   Rael Salley

2. Caster runs for me
   Doyin Ola

3. Transsexual’s nightmare: activism or subjugation?
   Audrey Mbugua

4. The media, the tabloid and the Uganda homophobia spectacle
   Kenne Mwikya

5. Mounting homophobic violence in Senegal
   Tidiane Kasse

7. Queer Kenya in law and policy
   Keguro Macharia

8. NGOs and Queer Women’s Activism in Nairobi
   Kaitlin Dearham

9. LGBTIQD: Does the label fit?
   Liesl Theron

10. Deconstructing violence towards black lesbians in South Africa
    Zethu Matebeni

11. Zanele Muholi’s intimate archive: photography and post-apartheid lesbian lives
    Kylie Thomas

12. Gallery
    Photographs by Zanele Muholi

Section 3

1. Disability and desire: journey of a filmmaker
   Shelley Barry

2. The vampire bite that brought me to life
   Nancy Lylac Warinda

3. Nhorondo – Mawazo yetu: Tracing life back – our reflections
   Zandile Makahamadze & Kagendo Murungi

4. What’s in a letter?
   Valerie Mason-John

5. Straight to the matter
   Olumide Popoola

6. Telling stories
   Happy Mwende Kinyili

7. LGBTI-Queer struggles like other struggles in Kenya
   Gathoni Blessol

8. Small axe at the crossroads: a reflection on African sexualities and human rights
   Kagendo Murungi

9. The portrait
   Pamela Dlungwana

10. Remember me when I’m gone
    Busiswe Sigasa

11. The danger of Malawi’s Gay and Lesbian discourse spinning on the human rights axis
    Jessie Kabwila Kapasula
    
    

Index

 

Related titles

Sylvia Tamale (ed), African Sexualities: A Reader

June 2011 GB pounds 24.95 978-0-85749-01

 

Sokari Ekine is an educator and writer who has been active in social justice issues around education, race, sexuality, gender, militarization and technology for over twenty years. Sokari has been a regular contributor to Pambazuka News since 2005 and she has published both as editor and author on social media, militarization, gender and human rights. Most recently she co-edited African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions.

Hakima Abbas, the executive director of Fahamu, has been active in struggles for social justice around issues of self-determination, race, class, gender and sexuality for over fifteen years. She has published extensively as editor and author of articles and books related to development, human rights and social justice.

Happy Birthday,

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Intelligent Design and the

Philosophy of Ignorance

by Maria Popova

 

Why even Newton was susceptible

to cognitive cop-outs.

Today marks the 54th birthday of the inimitable Neil deGrass Tyson, who blends the “Great Explainer” quality of Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan’s penchant of the poetry of the cosmos with a brand of eloquence all his own. He’s previously made a political case for space exploration, showed us why we’re wired for science, and bantered with Colbert about scientific literacy, education, and the universe. In this short excerpt from a longer lecture, Tyson exposes intelligent design as a kind of dead-end cop-out that even some of history’s greatest intellectuals resorted to when stumped — including Sir Isaac Newton, who invented calculus at the tender age of 25.

Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. It is you get to something you don’t understand, and then you stop. You say, ‘God did it,’ and you no longer progress beyond that point.

Tyson dives deeper into the subject in his excellent 2007 book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.

It Happened to Me:

My Mother Left Us

I was terrified of becoming a mother because I thought that I would also leave my kids.

By Nam Kiwanuka

Aug 8, 2012

Growing up, I tried not to miss my mother.

When I fell in love with Jeremy in third grade, it was my older sister Jackie I confided in. She was the one who sat with me at the kitchen table and helped me with my homework. And when my father kicked me out when I was 16, Jackie gave up a scholarship to an out-of-town university so that she could get an apartment with me. She wanted to make sure that I graduated from high school. 

But it wasn’t until I had my son last year that I needed my mother. After an emergency C-section, my son was born with barely a heartbeat and had to be resuscitated. Hours later he was rushed to NICU.

I remember sitting in the parents’ waiting room at the hospital with my husband and sobbing non-stop. I’d just seen my son’s tiny body hooked up to wires in the incubator.

I was in England, where my husband and I lived. Later, as I spoke to my sister from my hospital bed, all I wanted was my mom to be with me. She never came. 

My mother left our family when I was 5 years old. Although my father was barely out of his teens, he stayed with the four of us. Whenever I saw a plane, I thought that my mother was on it, coming to get us. My father never told us that she’d left us for good. It was only later that I found that out. 

I was 17 when I next saw my mother. My sister found out that she lived in Connecticut, so we decided to go see her. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, but I imagined that when I saw her she would hold me, all of the pain I’d felt all those years without her would disappear.

I thought that the memories of my father pushing me down the stairs and then trying to strangle me would fade away. Instead, I didn’t recall her face. She was standing with a woman and as I walked off the bus platform, I heard the lady say, “That’s your daughter? She looks white.” The woman was speaking in our native language, Luganda. My mother looked down and said nothing.

As young kids in East Africa, we were ridiculed for being mixed. People used to spit at us and throw stones at us and called us Mzungu. My mother’s brothers would say that when we grew up, we would clean their children’s homes and be their servants.

When my mother’s friend said white, she said it the way people used to say it to me as a child, before I was hit or spat at. My mother not saying anything felt worse than when my father punched me.

When my son was eight weeks old, my husband and I moved across the ocean to be closer to my sister and friends in Canada. Growing up in Kenya and Uganda, I knew that it took a village to raise a child. My mom didn’t come to visit me when I had my son. She told our relatives that she had.

I knew that ticket prices from the States to London were expensive and I hoped that once I moved closer to her in Toronto that she would come to visit. I couldn’t wait for her to meet my son. But she never came. She didn’t meet my son until he was 10 months old, when I went to visit my sister.

This past Christmas, my mother said she would come to Canada to spend time with my son. The day my sister was to drive with her from New England, she called me to tell me that our mother had a heart attack. I felt as though she was talking about someone we vaguely knew. I was worried, but I wasn’t sad or scared.

My sister, however, was very upset. She sounded disoriented. I told her not to come. I didn’t want her to leave our mother alone and I didn’t want her to drive.

Several hours later, we found out that although our mother had been to the hospital, she did not have a heart attack. She never ended up coming to Canada.

My mother has said she didn’t have a happy childhood. She never knew her own father and she had my older sister when she was 13. Perhaps she was never able to connect with us because even though we needed her, she didn’t need us. 

I often wonder about what would have happened to my sisters and brother if our dad had also left. I imagine that we would have ended up on the streets begging for food.

My mother brags about our accomplishments even though she played no role in the people we are today. She still denies abandoning us and blames our father for her leaving. Now in her mid-50s, her priority is to secure her children’s loyalties so that she doesn’t end up alone. 

I was terrified of becoming a mother because I thought that I would also leave my kids. It was easier to think that my mother had no control of what she did. My ego didn’t want to believe that she left because she wanted to.

People used to say to me that I would understand my mom more once I became a mother. Watching my son take his first step, I understand her less.