Submit now for our BODIES AND FACES Anthology!
Submissions open June 15, 2026, and close July 15, 2026.
In the fall of 2025 and spring of 2026, we featured our Zora Neale Hurston Fellow, Suzanne Pickett, exploring the theme of Bodies and Faces. Suzanne’s body of work focused on themes of nature, bird, flowers, and children free to live and grow into healthy bodies and healthy minds. With this “house exhibition” now complete, we invite other artists and writers to submit work inspired by these important explorations—reflecting on your own journeys, memories, and imaginings of BODIES AND FACES. See below for submission details and a link to submit your work.
BODIES & FACES
(a) river rising Anthology, Vol. VIII
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: BODIES and FACES (Vol. 8), by July 15, 2026.
ELIGIBILITY
- Writers: Writers who identify as women and have participated in any of our Jacksonville writing circles since 2020. If possible, please submit at least three thoroughly edited pieces to give us the best opportunity to select the one that best fits with our theme.
- Artists: Artists who identify as women and/or with the feminine experience 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 30 writers (15 poems, 15 essays, approximately) and 40 artists; please submit early. Writers and artists who participated in the Bodies and Faces writing semesters (Fall 2025 and Spring 2026) 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.
Additionally, in keeping with the spirit of this anthology, all writing and artwork must be an original work created by the submitting artist or writer. We are interested in the texture of lived experience, not content generated by artificial intelligence. Please bring us the work only YOU can make.
DEADLINE: JULY 15, 2026
THEME: Bodies and Faces
This anthology is based on writing and art inspired by the theme of our Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters: Bodies and Faces.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS DETAILS
“I am somebody. A body. A difficult body, to be sure… But some body. Mine. Me. In establishing myself as a writer, however modest my success, I have ceased to be nobody. I have written my way into my embodied self, and here I am at home.”
—Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House
“Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections—and that we work to create space for those intersections.”
—Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
For our eighth annual anthology, Bodies and Faces, we are creating space for women writers and artists to engage with embodiment, identity, visibility, vulnerability, and radical self-love. This volume will carry the stories we carry in our bodies and on our faces—seen and unseen. As a community, we ask: What does it mean to fully inhabit ourselves? Which wounds have scarred over? What memories, joys, and griefs linger beneath them?
Inspired by the work of Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology, this anthology seeks works that honor the body as a living archive of experience, pleasure, survival, contradiction, becoming—the beauty of being known from the inside out.
Rooted in our circle process of deep listening and thoughtful response, this collection continues the legacy of Women Writing for (a) Change Jacksonville by celebrating the power of creative expression as the thread that allows us to better understand ourselves and connect with one another.
We welcome writing and visual art that explores:
- The body as memory
- The mask we present, the face we hide
- Embodiment
- Beauty, shame, visibility, and self-perception
- Identity
- Self-love and self-acceptance
- Touch, intimacy, and connection
- Healing and reclamation
We invite you to bring your whole self to the page or canvas, in all of your fullness and nuance. We are excited to see the world through your eyes and collaborate on a collection that centers the many ways we come home to ourselves and to each other.
ART GUIDELINES
- Artwork must be the original work of the artist.
- Upload artwork that is camera-ready only (high resolution, high quality, 300 DPI).
- We accept paintings, collage, mixed media, photography, and sculpture.
- Digital art may also be accepted, including works with sound, video, etc.
- 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 in submissions form.