************SUBMISSIONS FOR IT WAS PARADISE ARE NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SUBMITTED.************
It’s time to announce the call for submissions to It Was Paradise*, a special issue of Reckoning edited by Sonia Sulaiman and with cover art by Mónica Robles Corzo. In a world devastated by catastrophes, we need stories that confront these horrors. This is all out war on the planet, on life itself. War and conflict as viewed through the lens of environmental justice, are the themes for this volume of Reckoning. Probe into the heart of extinction, genocide, and climate crisis. Expose the exploitation of the earth. Show us how the world could be on the other side. Send us your stories of violence, imperialism, fascism, and resistance, of destruction, survival, and of triumph. Send us your creative writing about war and environmental justice.
It Was Paradise is open for submissions now through the summer solstice, June 22, 2025, with tentative release scheduled for October. Payment rate will be 15 cents (US) per word for prose, $75 per page for poetry and art. As always, we’re seeking submissions from Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise marginalized human beings from everywhere, but in particular for this issue, we will be prioritizing work by people with lived experience of war and conflict. We’ll continue to accept submissions to our communication-themed regular issue, Reckoning X, throughout. Also, during this submission window only, we’re relaxing our usual rule about multiple submissions to allow folks to submit to both calls simultaneously.
Submit your work here! Read the full guidelines here.
*A reference to the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
