© Kara Walker

Call for Submissions

Special Issue: A Nation of Many: 250 Years of Reckoning and Renewal

Publication: July 2026

Deadline: March 1, 2026

In 2026, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. Anniversaries invite reflection, and they also invite critique. What does it mean to commemorate a nation’s birth when the questions of international policy, justice, belonging, and power remain urgent and unresolved? What does it mean to measure 250 years of promises and betrayals, of violence and renewal, of voices silenced and voices rising?

For this special issue of The Pasticheur, we seek work from writers, poets, artists, and thinkers across all traditions and geographies. We want to gather a chorus of perspectives that will not only revisit the country’s origins but also confront where it stands today. We invite contributions that explore freedom and exclusion, democracy and disenfranchisement, myth and memory, the local and the global.

Visual and literary works will appear side by side, opening a dialogue across form and medium. We welcome fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, critical essays, visual art, photography, sculpture, short film, and multimedia. Above all, we seek voices that complicate the story, that bring contradiction and clarity, that imagine what it means for the United States to stand at this threshold 250 years later.

Please submit through [email]. Include a short bio and indicate the title of the special call you are submitting to.

With this issue, we hope to create a space where reflection meets resistance, and where memory opens toward possibility.