Call for Submissions: Mizna 27.2
Submissions open Friday, May 29, 2026 and close Monday, July 6, 2026
Please read the full call for submissions carefully. Submissions that do not adhere to guidelines will be discarded unread.
Theme
Mizna is opening submissions for its newest issue, seeking poetry, prose, and hybrid literary work that focuses on ancestry and indigeneity. Guest-edited by poet and scholar Umniya Najaer, this issue is interested in honoring Indigenous wisdoms in their many forms and giving space for writers and artists to explore their relationships to ancestry, inheritance, memory, spirit, land, flora, fauna, and the cultural practices that have grown from them. Amid mounting planetary brutalities, how do our ancestors speak across time? How do our experiences echo, extend, or depart from those of our ancestors? What freedom dreams have each of us inherited, and how do we live these dreams? What methods do we as writers, artists, and cultural stewards call upon to center Indigenous wisdoms and carry ancestral stories forward, whether they belong to direct kin, chosen kin, communal lineages, our deep species ancestors, or more-than-human kin?
We invite work that views ancestry and indigeneity not as static legacies, but as living practices of remembering, grieving, resisting, creating, and imagining otherwise. We are especially interested in work that attends to the intimate and collective forms through which ancestral knowledge ruptures, transforms, and survives—in kitchens, songs, ceremonies, gardens, garments, prayers, archives, dreams, rivers, ruins, and revolutionary movements. We welcome work that utilizes experimental methods to tell new stories about our ancestors, our obligations to the living, and our relationships to land, indigeneity, sovereignty, memory, and belonging.
This issue begins from the question of rootedness: What does it mean to belong to land, lineage, memory, and place across Southwest Asia and North Africa? Across the vast SWANA region, communities have long been bound to one another through overlapping histories of migration, trade, kinship, pilgrimage, agriculture, pastoralism, urban life, and shared ecological worlds. People have practiced nomadic, agrarian, and urban lifestyles; passed on ancestral wisdom and practices; endured, resisted, and adapted to invasion, conquest, empire, enslavement, displacement, and extraction. How have histories of successive empires, interferences, destructions of heritage and sacred sites, forcible removals of people groups, and slave trades altered lives and landscapes? How have modern nation states, colonial borders, Western colonialism, neoliberal militarism, capitalist extraction, and the expansionist settler colonial project of Israel—financed and justified by the United States—intensified the struggle over land, memory, and sovereignty? And how are these struggles further compounded by regional imperial and sub-imperial powers, including Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates, whose extractive investments, proxy wars, and militarized interventions in Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere have deepened contests over belonging, territory, resources, self-determination and collective survival?
More concretely, how do those of us whose homelands are under active economic and military siege create new cultural technologies for surviving the present? How do those of us violently separated from our ancestral homes keep Indigenous practices alive? How do those of us living in settler colonial states such as the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand support Indigenous struggles, land rematriation, sovereignty, and ecological repair? What solidarities, tensions, responsibilities, and contradictions emerge when our own freedom dreams unfold on lands whose Indigenous peoples continue to struggle for liberation? We welcome narratives from across the region that investigate and grapple with indigeneity and ancestry in a SWANA context while making connections with global Indigenous struggles.
Transregional SWANA beyond the cartographic genres of area studies
We’re interested in how and to what extent the term indigeneity maps onto the SWANA context. A SWANA framework that stops at the inherited borders of “the Middle East” risks reproducing the very colonial cartographies it is designed to unsettle. While SWANA conventionally names South West Asia and North Africa, the histories of indigeneity, land, water, sovereignty, and dispossession that animate the region cannot be understood apart from the Sahara-Sahel, the Nile Valley, the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the western Indian Ocean. For this reason, Mizna 27.2 embraces communities and geographies often placed outside the edges of SWANA, including South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Pakistan, and India. These sites are constitutive zones through which transregional SWANA histories of mobility, empire, enslavement, ecological relation, and Indigenous world-making have unfolded.
We especially welcome work that attends to Black, Afro-descended, and Afro-Indigenous communities across the region, including Haratin, Tebu, Black Tunisian, Black Moroccan, Afro-Iraqi, Afro-Iranian, Zanj-descended, Sudanese, and other communities whose histories raise urgent questions about the relationship between indigeneity, Africanity, Arabization, enslavement, anti-Blackness, and caste. At the same time, we invite submissions from writers and artists working across the many Indigenous and ancestral transregional SWANA communities, including Amazigh, Assyrian, Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian, Nubian, Beja, Bedouin, Yazidi, Mandaean, Coptic, Marsh Arab, Ahwazi, Afar, Somali, Oromo, Tuareg, and other peoples whose histories unsettle the boundaries of the region itself.
Submissions are due by July 6, 2026 at 11:59pm CT.
General Submissions Guidelines
CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors do not need to be SWANA- or Arab-identified and can be based anywhere in the world, but work submitted should be considerate of Mizna’s ethos and the social realities of our audiences, as well as aim to contribute to ongoing conversations in and beyond our communities. While we welcome submissions from former contributors seeking a space for their work in this urgent moment, we also especially encourage submissions from writers who have never been published by us before. We encourage submitters to become familiar with work that has been published in Mizna before submitting work.
FORMS OF WRITING
Mizna has long been a home for literature with innovative, experimental forms and is published with high quality print production practices. We welcome visual poetry submissions or hybrid works that cross the arbitrary boundaries of genre. In general, literary works of poetry, visual poetry, fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, comics, collage, invented forms, and any forms of mixed print or hybrid work will be accepted, with consideration to the physical parameters of our print journal, technical staff, and budget. We do not consider visual art submissions.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
> There are no submission fees.
> Selected contributors will receive a $200 honorarium, a one-year subscription to Mizna, and five copies of the issue.
> Please include a short cover letter (max. 200 words) with the following:
- Titles of all submitted pieces
- Indication of any simultaneous submissions
- For prose over two pages, a 1–2 sentence overview of the piece
- Author bio (max. 50 words)
- Any additional information you would like the editorial team to know (max. 1 paragraph)
> File types must be .doc or .docx or PDF for pieces with more complex layouts. We do not accept other file types (e.g. Pages, Notepad, JPEG).
> Prose submissions should be double spaced and limited to 3000 words.
> Pitches for essays will not be accepted, please submit only complete and finalized drafts.
> Poetry submissions should be limited to four poems of any length (verses exceeding our page width will be treated with a runover indent).
> Please only submit once per submission period.
> Please do not send visual art submissions.
> Submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines are subject to being discarded unread. Submissions outside the open call window will likely not be considered or receive response.
> Pieces are chosen by Mizna editorial staff and a regularly changing selection committee. Accepted pieces will be contracted to be published in print after an editorial process involving authors. Mizna will hold rights to publish online or in future publications, but authors will hold copyright. Emails will be sent out for rejected pieces but regrettably we do not have capacity to provide feedback or editorial support.