On Rivers
Ends on
Editors: Teresa Dzieglewicz and Laura-Gray Street
Consulting Editors: Lucien Darjeun Meadows and Irene Vázquez
Open for submissions on February 1, 2023
All submissions are due by April 15, 2023
A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It remembers everything. — Natalie Diaz, “The First Water is the Body”
For this upcoming issue, coeditors Teresa Dzieglewicz and Laura-Gray Street, with consulting editors Lucien Darjeun Meadows and Irene Vázquez, invite submissions of prose, poetry, visual art, and hybrid and multi-modal work pertaining to rivers. Rivers are deep sources of connection and memory, holding very different meanings for different communities, and this issue seeks to honor the many types of relationships we have with rivers.
We welcome a wide range of perspectives and types of writing and art, including experimental and/or speculative work; interviews; graphic memoir, poetry, or fiction; scholarly, legal, or scientific prose written for a general audience; and translations (with originals). We seek work from activists, artists, creatives, environmentalists, writers, and all who are deeply engaged with rivers, regardless of academic, professional, or publication history. We’re looking to create a collective view on rivers that is expansive and surprising.
We welcome work that might engage, among other themes:
- rivers as water bodies and bodies of water
- rivers as hydrological networks
- rivers as transport
- rivers as centers not edges of habitation and meaning
- rivers as human connective tissue
- rivers as capillary action
- rivers as fluency and artistry
- rivers as influence and confluence
- rivers as political ecologies
- rivers as entities with legal “personhood”
- rivers as living beings and relatives
- rivers as sites of memory
If you would like to pitch a specific idea for an interview, please email us at blackearthinstitute@gmail.com.
We look forward to engaging with your art and learning about your rivers!
Issue Editors
Teresa Dzieglewicz is a poet, educator, and lover of rivers and prairies. She is a fellow with Black Earth Institute, a Poet-in-Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, an Associate Editor at RHINO Poetry, and part of the founding team of Mni Wichoni Nakicizin Wounspe (Defenders of the Water School). Her first book of poetry, "Something Small of How to See a River" was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2023. Her first children's book, co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books in 2025. She has won a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Prize, and the Palette Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Community of Writers at Tahoe, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Brooklyn Poets. Teresa lives with her family in Chicago, on Potawatomi land.
Black Earth Institute fellow Laura-Gray Street is author of Pigment and Fume and Shift Work and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. Her poetry has received prizes from The Greensboro Review, the Dana Awards, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Science and Nature Writing, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments; and been supported by fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Artist House at St. Mary's College in Maryland, and the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, where she was the Garland Distinguished Fellow in 2016. Street is a professor of English, directs the Creative Writing and Visiting Writers Series Program, and edits Revolute, the MFA's literary journal, at Randolph College on the unceded traditional lands of the Monacan Indian Nation called Lynchburg, Virginia, beside the James River, which inspires her art, her play, and her activism.
Consulting Editors
Lucien Darjeun Meadows was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of what is sometimes called Virginia and West Virginia to a family of English, German, and Cherokee descent. Author of In the Hands of the River (Hub City Press, 09/2022), he has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, American Association of Geographers, and National Association for Interpretation. Lucien is currently a volunteer ranger assistant, ultramarathon runner, and PhD candidate at the University of Denver.
Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, and child of the Gulf Coast, currently based in Hoboken, NJ on the banks of the Hudson river, the unceded territory of the Munsee Lenape people. Irene's debut chapbook Take Me To the Water was released by Bloof Books in October 2022. By day, Irene works at Levine Querido, editing books about feisty twelve-year-olds. In 2021, with the support of the Pulitzer Center, Irene reported on environmental justice advocacy and healing in Black and Indigenous communities on the Louisiana coast. Irene is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer, whose work can be found in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others.