BLACK LIVES MATTER
At Split Lip Magazine, we continue to be outraged by the racist violence and state-sponsored brutality in America, most recently evident in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and, devastatingly, others. Black Lives Matter. We denounce white supremacy and racism, in particular the structural racism that exists in all levels of our society—from healthcare, housing, employment, education, and law enforcement to the publishing industry.
Elevating new and diverse voices is central to our mission, though we are aware that we can and must continue to grow in this aspect. Publishing the work of Black, Indigenous, POC, LGBTQ+, Women, Disabled, and other marginalized peoples is greatly important to us. While we have solicited the work of diverse voices for some time, our submissions queue remains very white. To publish and promote more diverse voices, especially Black voices, we seek to enact changes that will actually combat the structural discrimination that we see in the literary world. We also acknowledge that we may not always be aware of the other ways we can make a difference. We invite any new ideas that we can also adopt.
Our immediate actions are:
Free Subs: We have opened free submissions in all genres to Black writers and artists for the rest of the year (with the exception of July, when we are closed to all submissions). We have already begun accepting some of the excellent work we’ve received in these submission categories.
Donations: To further promote Black voices, we are donating $200 to The Watering Hole, whose “core purpose is to cultivate and inspire kinship between poets of color from all spoken and written traditions, thus creating a tribe with a mutual focus of poetics and craft-building,” and $200 to Kimbilio, “a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.”
June 2021 Issue: We will publish a special online issue in June 2021 to promote Black voices. SLM Contributing Editor Tyrese Coleman will serve as Editor for this issue. She has selected the theme of “Summertime.” If you have not already read it, we encourage you to check out the incredible Valentine’s Day issue Tyrese edited at Barrelhouse on the theme of “Love.” That issue is a model for ours. We will share more details about our special issue in the coming months.
Solicitations: We are actively soliciting the work of emerging Black authors to better amplify diverse voices. We are a paying market and recognize the importance of not asking Black authors to write for free.
Outreach: We will be reaching out to the mailing list administrators of organizations such as Kundiman, Mizna, Red Ink Initiative, AAWW, Kimbilio, RAWI, VONA, Trans Women Writers Collective, and Women Who Submit with submissions calls. If there are other organizations you think we should add to this list, please let us know.
Building a Diverse Staff: We are actively working to recruit and promote diverse readers and editors within our own organization. We aspire to be an organization where all staff members have the power to shape the magazine’s content and vision. When we put out calls for readers and editors, our applicants tend to be overwhelmingly white. We have actively reached out to BIPOC members of the literary community and the SLM contributor family when positions open, and we will increase our outreach efforts in the future.
Fellowship: We would like to establish a year-long fellowship for a Black writer. The fellowship would provide a monetary award, editorial feedback on the fellow’s writing, publication in an online issue of SLM, and participation in the magazine as a staff reader. (Thanks to Assistant Flash Editor Eshani Surya for suggesting this.) We are currently studying how we might fund and implement this fellowship, so we will keep you posted on our plans.
Promote: We will continue to promote the Black authors we publish with tweets, readings, and special blog features. Promoting all of our authors is a big part of the work we do.
We are deeply saddened by the violence against Black people in our country. As protesters and activists across the U.S. continue to fight for equity and justice in all spheres, we hope to help bring structural and cultural change to the literary world. We know that for years BIPOC writers and editors in this community have been committing themselves to the deep and hard work of bringing about greater equality and elevating/publishing Black writers. We are grateful for their efforts and glad to follow their lead in bettering Split Lip Magazine and beyond.