The deadline for art, poetry, and short fiction submissions has been extended to January 31, 2024. Read More
upEND Movement invites you to submit Afrofuturist-inspired visual art, poetry, and short works of fiction to our first creative publication, Dream, Create, Liberate: A Future Without Family Policing. As is often mentioned, part of the work of abolition is to imagine a world that can exist outside of the damaging, punitive systems that overwhelmingly harm the people most marginalized in society. Our hope is to join artists and activists together, in community, to dream of this new world.
Afrofuturist Art, Call for Submissions
upEND Movement invites you to submit Afrofuturist-inspired visual art, poetry, and short works of
Visual Art Judge
Adam Pendleton’s (b. 1984) multidisciplinary practice uses text, gesture, and appropriated imagery to reconsider social resistance, avant-garde art, and underrepresented historical movements. Across silkscreen paintings, photographic collage, video, performance, and publishing, Pendleton filters ideas and aesthetics from the Black Arts Movement, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Dada through a graphic, monochromatic palette. The resulting pieces explore Blackness and race from myriad perspectives. Pendleton describes his work as “Black Dada,” a phrase originally coined by the poet Amiri Baraka. He has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Seoul, and Johannesburg. His work belongs in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Long Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.
Short Fiction Judge
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.
Poetry Judge
Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton is an internationally-known writer, director, performer, critic, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Houston, TX. She is author of the Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019), its German counterpart Berichtenswert (Elif Verlag, 2021), and the recently released memoir Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co, 2023). She has been a contributing writer for Glamour, Texas Monthly, and ESPN’s The Undefeated. Her most notable productions include Marian’s Song (Houston Grand Opera, 2020) & Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson, (Stages, 2022). She is a Resident Artist with American Lyric Theater, Rice University, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC).
– From How We endUP, our seminal publication puts forth ideas about how we can, in community, improve support and care for children, youth, and families as we move towards the abolition of family policing.
For more specific questions on what we’re going for, contact the team at info@upendmovement.org