Submit now for our PLACES & SPACES Anthology! Submissions open June 1, 2025, and close July 1, 2025.
In the fall of 2024 and spring of 2025, we featured our Zora Neale Hurston Fellows, Emily Mitchell and Teresa Cook, exploring the theme of Spaces & Places. Emily’s work drew inspiration from her family’s deep roots in North Florida, while Teresa’s art and research centered on the life and legacy of Zora Neale Hurston during her time in Jacksonville. With this “house exhibition” now complete, we invite other artists and writers to submit work inspired by these powerful explorations—reflecting on your own journeys, memories, and imaginings of SPACE & PLACE. See below for submission details and a link to submit your work.
SPACES & PLACES
(a) river rising Anthology, Vol. VII
Dear friends,
We invite you to submit your work for the latest edition of our annual anthology, a river rising: Anthology of Women’s Voices: SPACES and PLACES Edition (Vol. 7), by July 1, 2025.
ELIGIBILITY
- Writers: Writers who identify as women and have participated in any of our Jacksonville writing circles since 2014. If possible, please submit more than one thoughtfully edited piece to give us the best opportunity to select the one that best fits with our theme.
- Artists: Artists who identify as women and are located in the Northeast Florida region. Art will be selected based on relevance to the theme and intentionality. Please submit more than one piece to give us the best opportunity to select a work that aligns with the theme.
Space is limited to 40 writers and 40 artists; please submit early. Writers and artists who participated in the Spaces and Places semesters (Fall 2024 and Spring 2025) will be given first priority if necessary.
Although we strive to be a radically inclusive publication, we reserve the right to decline writing or art that we feel does not fit the theme, is harmful to someone, violates our community standards (see our website), or requires significant further development to be ready for our audience.
DEADLINE: JULY 1, 2025
THEME: Spaces and Places
This anthology is based on writing and art inspired by the theme of our Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters: Spaces and Places.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS DETAILS
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
—Maya Angelou“You’re the place I call home. You’re the place I put down my roots. You’re the place I know I belong.”
—Louise Erdrich
What does space mean to you? What defines a place?
For our 7th annual anthology, Spaces and Places, we invite women writers and artists to explore the landscapes of belonging, the boundaries that confine us, the rooms that hold our dreams, and the paths that lead us home. This volume will center on the physical, emotional, cultural, and mythical dimensions of space and place—how they shape us, and how we, in turn, shape them.
As human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “Place is security and space is freedom. We are attached to the one and long for the other.”
We’re asking: Where do you feel free? Where do you feel safe? What spaces have you longed for, fought for, or lost? What places do you return to in memory or imagination?
This anthology continues the legacy of Women Writing for (a) Change Jacksonville by providing a safe space and creative place for writers and artists who identify as women to share their truth. Inspired by Tuan’s insights and Virginia Woolf’s call for “a room of one’s own,” we honor the importance of claiming both literal and metaphorical space to create, speak, and be seen.
We welcome writing and visual art that explores:
- Sacred space
- Mythical or ancestral places
- Cultural or historical attachments to land
- Domestic space—confined or reclaimed
- Public vs. private space
- Biased or inaccessible spaces
- The body as space or place
- Movement through space as transformation
Whether your lens is intimate or expansive, we want to hear your story. Let us walk your landscape with you. Together, let’s map the spaces and places that shape our lives—and imagine new ones into being.
ART GUIDELINES
- Artwork must be camera-ready (high resolution, high quality, 300 DPI).
- We accept paintings, collage, mixed media, photography, and sculpture.
- Digital art is also accepted, including works with sound, video, etc.
- Artwork must be the original work of the artist.
- By submitting, artists agree that images of their work may be used in promotional materials for the anthology and related events. NOTE: See terms of use below.
