Photo: Lydia Brown reading a section of Frederick Douglass' speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" at Boston's annual communal reading in July 2015. Photo by Pamela J. Coveney.
To our friends, our comrades in the struggle, our supporters, our beautiful community of autistic and other neurodivergent, sick, and disabled folks,
Last summer, we reached out to you about an ambitious new anthology to gather and center the voices of autistic people of color for the first time in a print collection celebrating our authenticity, power, and struggles. (Our working anthology title is All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism.)
A year later, we have collected several dozen submissions, and are about to go into the first round of editing.
We're calling on you for your support in getting the word out about submissions!
If you or someone you know identifies as both autistic and a person of color -- especially if you identify as Black or Indigenous (or both) -- we invite you to submit your writing in any style or genre and on any topic for the anthology. (You count as autistic whether you are self-identified or medically diagnosed, and you count as a person of color if you don't consider yourself white.)
We welcome nonfiction, advocacy pieces, personal essay, memoir, short fiction, poetry, and artwork submissions. (If you submit any artwork, you must also submit a text-only caption/description along with your art.) We invite pieces that highlight the intersection of autism and race, but will also happily consider pieces that do not explicitly focus on this intersection.
Check out our details and guidelines about submissions, and send as many pieces as you like to Lydia Brown at lydia@autistichoya.com.
(You can publish under any name you want for any reason, and you don't have to tell us those reasons.)
We are especially interested in submissions from autistic people of color who live outside the United States or who are otherwise multiply marginalized. Autistic people of color of any age can submit work.
The deadline for this second round of submissions is 15 November 2015.
Please share this information across your all of your networks!
In solidarity,
Lydia Brown * Elesia Ashkenazy * Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu
Project Team
*********
Here is some slightly updated information from the original call for submissions:
WHAT IS THIS PROJECT?
A collection of things written by autistic people of color talking about their lives, experiences, ideas, work, or other stories. The project will become a book available in different formats. Lydia Brown is the lead editor for the anthology, which will be published through the Autism Women’s Network.
WHO CAN BE PART OF THE PROJECT?
Anyone who self-identifies as
1. Autistic
(with or without a formal diagnosis, includes PDD-NOS and Asperger's, and perhaps NLD/NVLD)
2. Person of color, racialized, or non-white
Specifically, you might consider yourself one or more of the following:
- Transethnic, transracial, or transnational adoptee of color
- Mixed race, biracial, or multiracial
- Migrant
- Indigenous, Native, Aboriginal, or First Peoples
- Black, Caribbean, African, or African
- Jewish, non-white
- Hapa
- East Asian, Southeast Asian, or Pacific Islander
- South Asian, Desi, Central Asian, or Middle Eastern
- Brown
- Latin@, Hispanic, or Latin American
You can be *any age* and live in *any country.*
WHAT CAN I SUBMIT?
Anything that you write or have already written. Your submission can be short or long, prose or poetry, formal or informal, academic or personal. Some possible formats include personal essays, creative non-fiction, poetry, blog posts, speeches, and academic writing. You may also submit more than one thing.
Some suggested topics (but you don't have to choose from this list):
- Living at the intersection of disability and race
- Cultural and community spaces for disabled people of color
- Passing as white or neurotypical
- Conceptualizing disability in non-white communities
- Intersectional social justice for disabled people of color
- Police brutality and profiling of disabled people of color, and state violence
- Intimacy, kinship, chosen family, romance, and sexuality
- Education
- Employment
- Housing
- Disability services
- Healthcare
- Activism and advocacy
- Further marginalized experiences (i.e., also being queer, migrant, trans*, poor, multiple-disabled, etc.)
- Representation and visibility
- Voice, silencing, erasure
- Socialization, communication
- Interdependence, healing, trauma
- Violence and abuse
- Resilience, power, reclamation, and solidarity
If you want more specific guidelines or concrete rules about submissions, contact Lydia Brown at lydia@autistichoya.com.
* Note: If it was published somewhere else, you need to have the legal right to submit it here.
CAN I USE A PSEUDONYM OR ALIAS?
If we choose your submission, we will use whatever name you want to appear. You can also submit one or more pieces that you would like to use your usual name on, and one or more pieces that you would like to use a different name on.
HOW DO I SUBMIT WRITING?
Email your writing to Lydia Brown at lydia@autistichoya.com. Submissions can be attachments or in the email.
