Call for Stories About Trauma

Call for Stories About Trauma

We seek personal stories about trauma for an anthology. Trauma is defined widely, including witnessing and/or experiencing a traumatic event or events during genocide, war, sexual violence, domestic violence, race/gender/religious/sexual orientation-based violence, childhood abuse, natural catastrophes and more.

The focus of the stories can be on describing traumatic events, exploring the impacts of trauma, coping, comparing life before the trauma with life after traumatic events, healing, and living with the after-effects of trauma. Submissions must tell a compelling personal story. Theoretical, literary, psychological and political analyses are appropriate for this anthology if they supplement a well-written personal experience.

By sharing a diversity of stories, the editors expect to illuminate similarities among trauma survivors despite obvious differences of geography, culture, age, gender, and type of trauma. At an art workshop for survivors of violence and genocide, we noticed that survivors of genocides in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as sexual violence in the U.S. discovered profound connections with each other across boundaries. This anthology is inspired by the post-trauma commonalities experienced by survivors.

We are looking for personal stories which examine impacts of traumatic experiences with significant literary merit. Previously published work is permissible but new work is much preferred.

Deadline: December 1, 2012
Word Limit: 3,500 word limit preferred. Longer pieces will be considered but are less likely to be accepted.

Send submission as a word doc or rtf to:
trauma.book(at)yahoo.com (replace (at) with @)


Full guidelines online.

Christine Stark is a writer, visual artist, and speaker with American Indian and European heritage. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize-Winning Essays, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Poetry Motel, and When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience. Her novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, was a 2011 Lambda Literary finalist. She is a co-editor of Not For Sale, an international anthology about sexual violence and coauthor of “Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota”. Her poem, “Momma's Song”, was released as a double CD manga by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble. She was selected as an emerging creative non-fiction writer by the Loft Mentor Series and she has won McKnight Awards for both her writing and visual art. She teaches writing part-time at Metropolitan
State University and lives in Minneapolis with her partner, April.

Fred Amram is a retired, award winning academic from the University of Minnesota. He has published three academic books, many book chapters and dozens of scholarly articles. He currently writes about his experiences in the Holocaust and as a refugee in his adopted country. Amram has recently published in Hippocampus, Whispering Shade, Prick of the Spindle, The Jewish Chronicle, Turtle River Press and other literary settings. He has two stories in Marking Humanity, an anthology about Holocaust survivors, and was selected as an emerging writer for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Program.