Tag Archives: news

Deadline for abstracts extended: AAWP Conference

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

Deadline extended: Abstracts/proposals due 30th June 2026

We invite scholarly and creative contributions that address these ideas directly or in tangential yet fresh ways. Abstracts/Proposals may address, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

First Nations voices in our world
The voice of the writer in the public sphere
Voice, power, representation
Voice, disability and neurodivergence
Diverse voices in the writing workshop
Voices in translation
Voicing the past, the present, and the future
Voicing the popular
Intertextuality and the voices of others in literary work
Mentoring relationships and voice
Prize culture and voice
Creative Writing pedagogy and voice
Our disciplinary voice in the higher education sector
Formalist or craft-based conceptions of voice, tone, and/or perspective
Vocalising the relationship between the human and the more-than-human
Vocal Aesthetics in literary texts
Algorithmic composition, SLMs, LLMs, machine automatism and the human voice
Voice as reflected in form and style (including hybrid forms that disrupt literary conventions and challenge genre classifications)
Voice as it can emerge in various modes of poetry, and in lyric prose

For more details regarding submission guidelines, visit the conference website hosted by UNSW.

Closing soon: AAWP Annual Conference Call for Abstracts/Proposals

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

Abstracts/proposals for individual papers or panels close 31 May 2026.

We invite scholarly and creative contributions that address these ideas directly or in tangential yet fresh ways. Abstracts/Proposals may address, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

First Nations voices in our world
The voice of the writer in the public sphere
Voice, power, representation
Voice, disability and neurodivergence
Diverse voices in the writing workshop
Voices in translation
Voicing the past, the present, and the future
Voicing the popular
Intertextuality and the voices of others in literary work
Mentoring relationships and voice
Prize culture and voice
Creative Writing pedagogy and voice
Our disciplinary voice in the higher education sector
Formalist or craft-based conceptions of voice, tone, and/or perspective
Vocalising the relationship between the human and the more-than-human
Vocal Aesthetics in literary texts
Algorithmic composition, SLMs, LLMs, machine automatism and the human voice
Voice as reflected in form and style (including hybrid forms that disrupt literary conventions and challenge genre classifications)
Voice as it can emerge in various modes of poetry, and in lyric prose

For more details regarding submission guidelines, visit the conference website hosted by UNSW.

Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issues on “Disabled People’s Creative Writing”

This special issue of TEXT aims to highlight the myriad ways in which disability engenders creative writing. We invite papers that explore the influence of impairment and disablement on writing techniques or topics. We are particularly, but by no means exclusively, interested in how these are entangled with other personal characteristics such as race, gender, age, and class.

Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):

Analysis of a particular disabled author
How impairment shapes creative writing
How disabled authors influence each other’s writing
Learning and unlearning writing conventions
Translating individual experience for a diverse audience
Stories told and stories concealed
Crip style, genre, etc
Disability politics and poetics

Editors: Associate Professor Jessica White and Dr Amanda Tink

Abstracts are due by 1 June.

Read the full details and submission guidelines via the TEXT website.

New Issue of Meniscus (14:1)

For this first issue of Meniscus for 2026, poets and stories approach ideas of grief, estrangement, ageing, and the fragile work of connection: between parent and child, between partners, between the living and the dead, or between the self and a world that has become unfamiliar. Even when the settings are domestic or ordinary, many of the stories in particular open onto something more unsettling, uncanny, speculative, or darkly comic.

Read Volume 14, Issue 1 of Meniscus, here.

Read TEXT Volume 30, Issue 1

This issue includes scholarly contributions by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington on ekphrastic poetry; Ekaterina Pechenkina, Carolyn Beasley and Julian Novitz on new models of creative writing workshop; Delia Falconer on mentorship; Jenny Hedley on depression diaries; Seth Robinson on imagining the end of the world; Jenny Hedley, Gareth Morgan, Stayci Taylor and Jessica Wilkinson on form; and Delia Falconer with Sarah Holland-Batt on models to inform the new Australian Poet Laureateship.

We review books by Nigel Krauth, Loribelle Spirovski, David Stavanger, Juliet A. Paine, Julia Prendergast, Phil Brown, Anna Donaldson and Matt Shank, Matthew Hooton, Barrina South, Siang Lu, and Benjamin Sheppard et. al.

New creative writing on writing in this issue includes work by Duc Dau, Belinda Rule, Diwakar Gautam, Stephanie Green, Md Mujib Ullah, Marshall Moore, Ryan O’Neill, Jane Downing, Caitlin Burns, Christos Constantine, Ian C Smith, Lauren Pitt, Julia Prendergast and Nikki Wong.

Read the full edition via the TEXT website.

Call for Short Stories: Social Alternatives

Social Alternatives is an independent, not-for-profit peer-reviewed journal publishing practical and theoretical articles on relevant topics, as well as reviews, short stories, poems, graphics, commentaries and critiques.

Authors are invited to submit short stories that have polished. No particular theme is required. The collective firmly recognises the ability for literature to comment on range of social issues and act as vehicle for social change. Fiction is by definition transformative, allowing us to reveal and re-imagine ourselves.

There is no specific deadline. Instead, writers are encouraged to submit their work when it’s ready for consideration.

Learn more about the submission guidelines via the Call for Short Stories flyer here.

Learn more about Social Alternatives via their website here.

Blue text reads: Social Alternatives. An illustration of Earth creates the O in 'Social'.

International Jay Yes Short Story Contest 2026

Theme: Seeking Refuge: Stories of Displacement

Genre: Short story

The Jay Yes International Short Story Contest 2026 is a global writing competition created for unpublished writers aspiring to share their stories with the world. Participants are invited to submit original short stories between 2500 and 4000 words.

Exceptional entries may also be considered for further publishing opportunities with the contest’s publishing partner, Zero Degree Publishing. There are other benefits including podcast opportunities for winners and contributors of anthology. With no entry fee and driven by an inclusive literary vision, the contest champions a shared commitment to storytelling. The jury eagerly looks forward to discovering bold, moving, and truly jaw-dropping narratives from across the globe.

Submissions close 8 May 2026.

Learn more via the competition website here.

AAALS Creative Writing Competition 2026

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS), together with the American Australian Association, welcomes submissions to our annual creative writing competition between 1-31 March 2026.

We invite entries in the following categories:

Poetry
Creative Prose
Indigenous Writers Poetry
Indigenous Writers Creative Prose

With the generous support of the American Australian Association, the winner of each prize will be awarded US$1000, plus publication in the journal Antipodes.

Further details about eligibility and submission requirements are available here: https://aaals.org/antipodes/, with submissions accepted through the Antipodes portal during March 2026: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/submission_guidelines.html.

Read TEXT Special Issue 76: Life Writing Beyond the Human

In our call for papers for this special issue, we solicited submissions of/about all modes of life writing that consider experiences, relationality, and intersubjectivity beyond the human. We posed the following questions to our potential collaborators:

• How do we write the abundance of more-than-human and nonhuman life in which we situate our own?
• What forms emerge when lives aren’t coded via anthropocentric timelines?
• How might anthropogenic climate change prompt urgent new forms of life writing that exceed and entangle human subjectivities?

As the essays and creative works within this special issue attest, such questions were only a partial list of possible lines of enquiry when it comes to life writing beyond the human. But all of these lines of enquiry are underpinned by a desire to undo the myth of human superiority.

Guest editors: Briohny Doyle & David McCooey

Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issue “Use Your Allusion – Intertextuality in Twenty-First Century Writing”

This special issue of TEXT seeks to publish scholarly papers and creative works concerned with and inspired by the theme of intertextuality. We are seeking creative works and scholarship that consciously respond to this tension, reflecting on or engaging in acts of allusion, rewriting and reimagining. In our contemporary moment of environmental, political and existential crisis, it is necessary to ask what purpose ‘writing back’ serves and how it might be done, especially in decolonising contexts.

Editors: Dr Aidan Coleman, (Southern Cross University), Associate Professor Melanie Duckworth (Østfold University College) and Associate Professor Adelle Sefton-Rowston (Charles Darwin University).

Abstracts for scholarly papers and creative work EOIs should be sent by 10 April 2026.

Read the full details and submission guidelines via the TEXT website.