SFWP Quarterly Issue 23 / Fall 2020
SFWP Quarterly
Issue 23 / Fall 2020
Table of Contents
Editor’s Note
Monica Prince, Managing Editor
Honoring the Promise: The Quarterly in 2021
In May and June of 2020, I sat in my house, watching as news reports of protests and unrest streamed in from all over the country. I felt the same way many Black folx at the time felt: helpless.
Yes, we could go to the streets, risk infection (which is impacting us and our Indigenous siblings at a higher rate than the dominant culture) and possible imprisonment or death.
We could write our poems and our stories and our essays, expending emotional labor for our own healing but also for the culture.
We could stay silent and try to take care of ourselves, while white people stay apologizing and “checking in” on us and promising things will be better when we have a different President, or a new law, or a reformed whatever — but don’t worry, they aren’t racist or sexist or homophobic or dangerous in any way because they are woke.
There were plenty of options for me this past summer as a Black cis woman. The easiest thing would have been to say nothing and try not to die from COVID-19, try to prepare for my fall semester for my students, and try to keep my emotional health intact for my family, friends, and lovers.
And, what does The Fray say? “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.” (I am from Colorado, after all.)
So, instead of doing nothing, or doing the bare minimum, I tried action. I resigned from an important taskforce at my university, one focused on action regarding diversity and inclusion on campus, because it felt traumatizing to be in the room with respected colleagues who had (maybe unknowingly) perpetrated harm against my students, faculty, and staff of color and myself while supporting diversity and inclusion efforts. I watched TV without folks of color. I read books by writers of color. I cleaned my house. I got committed to my partner. I prepped our summer issue of the Quarterly. I promised next year would be different.
But, as I am a woman of color in a position of power at SFWP, I was called upon to write our solidarity statement for the press. And it hurt to write. It took too long. I cried while writing it — not because I was lying, but because I was tired of having to defend institutions of white supremacy: universities, publishing houses, my own literary community.
No one else could write it. I wouldn’t have let anyone else do it. Not without skin in the game, as they say. Money isn’t the same thing as stake. I was the person of color with power. It was my job.
It’s a good statement. It’s not a solidarity statement; more like a promise to do better. To sign more authors of color. To promote more diversity across our publishing catalog. To not let the trauma of tokenism harm the future of this press. And that requires action.
So, while I deserted the taskforce at my university, I haven’t deserted SFWP. I want more diversity — for my own sake, but also for the sake of writers like me who are so frequently the only one when it comes to readings, performances, publications, and listings. This year, so many writers of color won major prestigious awards; many were the first folx of color to do so. I’m tired of celebrating the first of Black people, of trans people, of women, of Native people, of any historically marginalized population in this country or another imperialist state. I don’t want to write another line about a first in a system we didn’t create, that wasn’t built for us, or wasn’t ever meant to include us.
Oscars, Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes, Pushcarts, Presidencies. Just choose.
If this is what writers of color are up against, then SFWP needs to do the work of the organizations built for writers of color. The best way to diversify the publishing industry is to do the work — create the opportunities, remove the barriers. It’s that simple.
We have four issues coming out for the SFWP Quarterly in 2021: February 1, May 1, July 1, and October 1. We’re only accepting marginalized writers for these issues. See the info below.
The point here is we believe in practicing what we preach, performing action alongside statements, and accepting that when a press is run by primary-white folks, they might not recognize the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy and the dominant culture. Doesn’t make them evil; just means we all need to do better.
Share these links and calls with your networks. We want your words. Remember Issue 18, our special Abortion Ban Protest issue? Think like that, but bigger, and louder, and about even more intersecting identities.
Let’s do this work together. I want to look back on my work with SFWP as some of the proudest. Thus far, I feel good about it. I bet I could feel even better about it.
Monica Prince, the managing editor for SFWP, teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). She is the co-author of the suffrage play, A Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter and check out her website.
Past Issues of The Quarterly