We received over 250 individual submissions to (home)Body. This is amazing — and it will take us a little longer than anticipated to complete the reading process.
Selected poets will likely be announced the week of March 21st.
Thank you for your patience!
Submit Poems to our new interdisciplinary project called (home)Body
- Four selected poets will each receive a $500 honorarium for an original work.
- Five additional poets will receive honorable mentions and one or more of their poems will appear on the project’s webpage.
(home)Body is an art installation with dance video, poetry, and live performance. This work is a collaboration between artistic director/choreographer Cid Pearlman, video artist Mara Milam, poet/dramaturge Denise Leto, and ten dance artists. The poems we commission will seek to represent a multiplicity of voices. They will inform the content we create and will function as scaffolding and inspiration for the dance and video.
We are looking for poems that speak to ideas around home and body in personal, experimental, and/or topical ways. The poems can range in metaphorical and embodied complexity. For example, the body in question can be the personal/individual body, the communal/community body, the body politic, and/or the synecdochal body.
Cid Pearlman is a 2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellow and funds from her award make possible the poets’ honoraria.
- The project will be installed at Radius Gallery and/or the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA beginning in January of 2022. Both venues are accessible.
- If you would like to request a specific accommodation, please contact us and we will do our best to work with you to create adaptive strategies and make the necessary arrangements.
- The dance films will be screened on large wall mounted monitors arranged around the gallery space. Adjacent to them, small tablets will stream video of the poets reading their work. Text from the poems will be painted on the gallery walls or posted on wall-sized pieces of paper.
Issues of representation, access, and equity are central to this project and will inform all aspects of the process and the work. We are deeply concerned with multiple modalities and expressions, co-creation, participatory practices, and audience experience.
Complete Guidelines
Submissions open: November 24, 2020
Deadline: February 15, 2021 at midnight PST
- We welcome all poetic forms and approaches (lyric, experimental, performance poetry, slam poetry, prose poems, etc.)
- We very much encourage new and emerging artists.
- If your publishing history is not extensive or if you have few publishing credits, or none, please submit!
- We also welcome interdisciplinary poets and poets who work in different media and genres.
- We are particularly interested in submissions from BIPOC poets, poets from the LGBTQIA+ community, young poets, and poets from disability communities across all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.
- Please send 3-4 poems, 10 pages maximum. (We are mindful that a single poem might inhabit a more spacious form such as one line per page. Such a poem would count as one. Therefore, you would be able to submit up to three additional poems, but of shorter length, each not more than 2 pages).
- There is no entry fee.
- Only electronic submissions will be considered.
- Submit the poems in a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
- Please include your name on each page; this is not an anonymous solicitation. Please number the pages, have only one poem per page unless it is longer, and have page breaks between each poem.
- In the subject line of the email please type: Poetry Submission, First Name, Last Name.
- In the body of your email, include a short cover letter with a short biographical statement (each no more than 75 words) and your contact information. Please do not send your poems pasted in the body of your email.
- We will not consider poems that have been previously published or performed. Please let us know if a poem has appeared on a blog, website, Twitter, Facebook or any other social media.
- Translations and poems not in English will be considered.
- Poems written by more than one person are eligible.
- Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you notify us immediately which poem has been accepted elsewhere.
- We cannot accommodate any revisions or edits to submitted poems during the reading period.
- Your poems will be considered and chosen by Denise, Cid, and Mara.
- Please check the dates and guidelines carefully. Due to time constraints, we are unable to consider any submission that is late, incomplete, or does not follow the guidelines.
Submissions open: November 24, 2020
Deadline: February 15, 2021 at midnight PST
Send to: homebodypoets@gmail.com homebodypoets@gmail.com
You will receive an email confirmation that your submission has been successfully submitted.
Selected poets will be announced in late February or early March 2021.
The final production is estimated to premier in January 2022.
(home)Body considers the unprecedented time we find ourselves in and we will follow pandemic protocols at each stage of the creative process.
It is a condition of entry that when you agree to submit your poems to (home)Body you grant us permission to work with/perform/show/read/record/reproduce any accepted poems or extracts thereof (including the honorable mentions). We are unable to offer additional payment or royalties for any reproductions, future performances, or uses beyond the initial award of $500 for the selected poets. The selected poems should not be published or released elsewhere before the initial premier of (home)Body. You grant us rights to archive all accepted work on our site, and through media closely associated with our site, including social media. All other rights remain with the author. If your work is published in another collection or presented in another production or performance after its inclusion here, we ask that you acknowledge (home)Body and Cid Pearlman Performance as being the project in which it first appeared.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work.