Rawhead: Point Blank is a new digital series featuring the work of a single writer or artist, released semi-monthly, in response to what is happening now. For this series, we are currently accepting poetry, creative nonfiction, visual art, and hybrid pieces. Two contributors will be selected each month and receive $30 for their work.
Mission:
The series exists as a form of resistance and documentation, a way of marking what is being done, who it is being done to, and how it is being fought. This series extends our core mission into the present tense, serving as a rapid-response record for the stories and injustices unfolding right now that cannot afford the distance of traditional publication schedules.
This is a space to name the realities of state violence: from the kidnapping and murder of our neighbors by ICE, to the genocide of the Palestinian people, to the plunder of the earth itself as our forests and oceans are sacrificed to endless greed. It is also a place to witness structural rot of the everyday: the indignity of economic hardship, the legislative attacks on our LGBTQ+ community, and the systemic racism that decides who is protected and who us pushed to the margins. This is a space to call out the corruption that impacts most people’s daily lives. We are meeting that force with a point-blank record of our own.
At the same time, we recognize that resistance is found in the persistence of hope and the labor of community care and everyday heroes. Rawhead: Point Blank is a space for the work that documents what is being built as much as what is being broken. We value stories of the things we create in spite of the powers that be: the mutual aid, the art, the defense of neighbors, the unexpected kindness of the world, and the daily ways we choose each other over the systems that despise us. A ledger of the moment is incomplete without the stories of those who insist on beauty and survival in the face of injustice.
We want to hear from anyone paying attention, whether that perspective comes from the shop floor, the classroom, the kitchen table, the picket line, the waiting room, the cell, the back roads, or the street. Rawhead has always been committed to work that does not look away, and this series holds space for these conditions to be named and remembered as they unfold. Submissions are open.
