In a partnership between Quattro Books and SubversivePress, we are seeking submissions of new work for a hybrid print/digital anthology slated for release in Spring 2023 as part of Quattro’s new series Languagings in Translation.
Rumi Roaming is an independent multi-poetic, multi-media and multi-lingual project by T’karonto(Toronto)-based artist and curator Gita Hashemi inspired by a decolonial reading of Rumi’s work. Unfolding in multiple movements and culminating in a presentation at Toronto’s 2022 Nuit Blanche, the project aims to generate new place-based responses to contemporary issues that use Rumi’s poetics as a jumping off point. The print/digital anthology is a companion volume.
Rumi’s poetry has become familiar to people across generations and cultures and is praised for its timeless spiritual resonance, but it is mostly mis-translated, de-contextualized, appropriated and highly commercialized in Western languages particularly in English. We are interested in submissions that challenge conventional and colonial readings of Rumi, and are anchored in specific impulses and concerns in relation to natural, social and cultural environments.
What new visions and poetics arise when we become Rumi in the contemporary world? How do we fuse spiritual urgency with the imperative to respond to oppressive politics and economies? How do we move through the fragmented and conflicting spaces of this particular historical moment with an awareness that is occasioned or inspired by Sufi challenges to hegemonic materialism and mainstream identities? How do we see or make visible, feel, problematize, traverse, bridge, cross, and/or transform “the space between us” starting from the words of Rumi?
Specifically, we ask that submissions respond to, start from, adapt or build on any of the poems (or lines thereof) posted here.
We are open to submissions that relate to other works of Rumi as long as they indicate the source. We strongly discourage working from popular translations unless it is to challenge or subvert them. See our list of English translations to avoid here.
We are open to works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, visual art, hybrid print genres, audio, video and experimental works that develop new forms.
We welcome deliberate multi-lingual and multi-script works. If you would like to submit a work of this nature, please contact us as early as possible before the deadline to discuss your submission.
We are particularly interested in submissions from IBPOC communities in Canata(Canada).
We ask for exclusive first publishing rights for three months after publication and for non-exclusive anthology rights in print and electronic formats. This means that the anthology has the right to publish the work first and in subsequent versions of the anthology, and contributors will retain rights to their work and are free to submit for reprint elsewhere three months after our publication date.
Selected contributors will receive fees according to the Writer’s Union of Canada or CARFAC schedules and a complimentary copy of the anthology.
Active since 2004, SubversivePress.Org is an independent borderless platform for disseminating critical art.
Iranian-born Gita Hashemi is an award-winning artist, curator and writer, a refugee, a displanted settler who works from T’karonto, the “Dish With One Spoon Territory,” the homelands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat nations, most recently the territory of the Mississaugas of Credit River.
Quattro Books is a Canadian small press based in Toronto, Ontario. Quattro publishes both poetry and novellas by established and emerging Canadian writers.
Languagings in Translation is a multi-lingual series dedicated to poetic works from Canada and around the world that explore the living entanglements of language, place and translation. Committed to a decolonial and multimodal approach to poetics, the series foregrounds languages in the full complexity of their visual, aural and gestural dimensions so as to foster translingual awareness and literacy among readers and cultural producers alike. The series is edited by Elena Basile.