* The African Literary Hustle*

Guest Editors: Mukoma wa Ngugi and Laura Murphy

cover of the latest edition of the New Orleans Review

When African literature is published in the West, it is too often realist, in English, and always in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, political allegory all find expression in Africa, though not necessarily publication. Those who are called to write often have to hustle to get recognition by writing a coming-of-age colonial encounter tale or hustle even harder to have their unique voices heard.

In a special issue of New Orleans Review guest edited by Mukoma wa Ngugi and Laura Murphy, we will celebrate (and publish) popular and not-so popular writing from Africa. We are looking for literature (in all the above named forms and others we can’t predict) and critical essays that expand the dimensions of African literature, contribute defiant visions, provide new translations, or revise narratives of the tradition or the hustle.

Prose submissions should be 7,500 words or fewer; poetry submissions five poems or fewer. Simultaneous submissions are okay. Submission deadline: December 31, 2016.

New Orleans Review, a journal of contemporary literature and culture, is a publication of the Department of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

Since its founding in 1968, the journal has published an eclectic variety of work by established and emerging writers, including: Walker Percy, Pablo Neruda, Ellen Gilchrist, Nelson Algren, Hunter S. Thompson, John Kennedy Toole, Richard Brautigan, Joyce Carol Oates, James Sallis, Jack Gilbert, Paul Hoover, Tess Gallagher, Sherman Alexie, Valerie Martin, Annie Dillard, Everette Maddox, Julio Cortazar, Gordon Lish, Robert Walser, Mark Halliday, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Harper, Angela Ball, Diane Wakoski, Dermot Bolger, Ernest J. Gaines, Roddy Doyle, William Kotzwinkle, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Arnost Lustig, Raymond Queneau, Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael Martone, Matthea Harvey, Bill Cotter, D.A. Powell, Rikki Ducornet, Ed Skoog, and many others.

Work published in the New Orleans Review has been reprinted in the Pushcart Prize, Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories From the South, Utne Reader, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies.

For more information, visit the New Orleans Review website.

Categories: Calls for & opportunities

Tags: African literature, Afrophone literatures, experimental literature, Laura Murphy, Mukoma wa Ngugi, popular writing