Love Letters to Spooks

Love Letters to Spooks, a Flash Spotlight feature, seeks to trouble and interrogate the mortal liminality that Black people in the United States experience. We seek poetry and microessay submissions that grapple with the absurdity of existence in a body not deemed worthy of life; submissions that interrogate death involving social demise: slander for people such as Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and erasure for people like Goddess Diamond and Mercedes Successful. We want work that examines how inhabiting precarious positions within humanity can make one feel less than mortal or even immortal. We want your haunted incantations and your spells for survival and self-care, but most importantly, we want you to breathe.

This is a literary space for Black people, curated by Black people. If you are a Black writer, please feel free to send us your work. Contributors will be paid.
Please submit up to five poems, and up to 2 pieces of prose in one file that total no more than 5 pages. Submissions close July 31st.

Creative Director: Xandria Phillips
Editor: Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah

Cover art by Randi Butler